John Shaw

“In the meantime, may I wish you in advance every happiness for the New Year. If it’s anything like the old one, I, for my part, would sooner consign it to the devil.”
― Karl Marx

“When the Active Intellect emanates upon the [prophet's] passive intellect, it is rational; when it emanates upon his imagination, it is prophetic”
― Al Farabi

“No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going is bad he comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interest, however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer advocating any political idea that was not absolutely self-seeking—that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the rest of us to his gain? ... There never has been a time, in good seasons or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Why, indeed, are politicians so polite to him—before election, so obscenely amorous? For the plain and simple reason that only one issue ever interests or fetches him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he can imagine himself only as getting it all and giving nothing.”
― H.L. Mencken

“There are causes (of justice and solidarity, of international anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist war; let everyone choose among these the one best suited to them)
 for which it may prove necessary to break 
the toughest and dearest bonds; that is, to choose what to put first, loyalty to a country,
 an ethnicity, a culture, a religious or familial tradition, to one’s own dead or instead to something other. I who write have put this ‘other’ first, every time I was faced with a conflict between duties and loyalty.”
― Franco Fortini