Bygone Conclusions

“The events in Bologna in 1920 were to provide the fascist movement, and then the regime, with one of their most powerful propaganda weapons, the equivalent of Hitler’s use of the Reichstag fire. Bologna,
they could state, had been in the hands of murderous ‘reds’. The trade unions and labour offices were, to quote the Bolognese fascist
Dino Grandi (and Mussolini): ‘a state within a state’. Bologna thus justified fascist violence (even though in many ways the events of
that day would not have taken place without fascist violence). Democracy could not be entrusted to ‘the reds’ and Bologna became
the blueprint not just for the destruction of local democracy, but for the overturning of democracy in general, and of the socialist and
trade union movement.”
― John Foot - Blood and Power

“literature, not academic treatises, affords a truer insight into an understanding of the human condition. While professors are busy strangling everything with jargon and footnotes, novels and poems are out there doing the real work: showing us what it actually feels like to be alive.....Literature is a better moral compass because it throws us into the vivid chaos of individual lives, instead of forcing human experience into some procrustean theoretical framework. Sometimes a single sentence from Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn, or Camus tells us more about integrity, honour, cruelty and hope than a thousand pages of scholarly ‘analysis’ ever could...”
― Michael Rainsborough

“Here among flowers a single jug of wine,
No close friends here, I pour alone
And lift cup to bright moon, ask it to join me,
Then face my shadow and we become three.

The moon never has known how to drink,
All my shadow does is follow my body,
But with moon and shadow as companions for a while,
This joy I find must catch spring while it's here.

I sing, the moon just lingers on,
I dance, and my shadow scatters wildly.
When still sober we share friendship and pleasure,
Then entirely drunk each goes his own way-

Let us join in travels beyond human feelings
And plan to meet far in the river of stars.”
― Drinking Alone by Moonlight - Li Po (translated by Stephen Owen)

“Without stepping out the door,
You can know the world.

Without looking through the window,
You can see Heaven's Way.

The longer you travel, the less you know.”
― Tao Te Ching - Chapter 47