“Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions--even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“What is truth?" Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
― On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species' history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them — not even its own reflection.”
― Children of Time
― Children of Time
Rachel’s 2025 Year in Books
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