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“The West’s adversarial political system, in which all manner of decisions were made by majority rule, was little more than a refined version of civil war, replacing one form of coercion (fighting) with another (voting).”
― To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
― To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
“Legal guarantees of freedom of expression, belief, and worship . . . were, like contemporaneous economic decrees, ways of shrinking certain sources and types of moral policing in favor of increasing state power overall. In much European and colonial law, though with important exceptions, a post-Reformation Christian idea was repurposed so as to make the state itself the guarantor of a wide field of choice.”
― The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
― The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
“The most important step toward domestic peace is an act of will; this country can do for its people what it chooses to do.”
― The Essential Kerner Commission Report
― The Essential Kerner Commission Report
“The deeper drama was not between signers and non signers, but within each individual signer. Putting one’s name on an open petition marked ‘a step toward internal liberation—and for many that step was decisive. This or that particular signature might have no significance whatsoever for the country’s political situation, but for the signer himself, it could become a kind of catharsis.”
― To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
― To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
“The notion that successful reform can emerge exclusively from within the ruling elite belongs among Russia’s most enduring and self-perpetuating myths, shared by figures as diverse as Gorbachev and Putin. Reforms initiated from outside the elite, so the argument goes, are doomed to failure, mass violence, or both. Never mind that such reforms have often been stymied by the elite itself, fearful of losing its monopoly of power, or that numerous reforms initiated from above have failed miserably.”
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Non Fiction Book Club
— 5112 members
— last activity 21 hours, 25 min ago
This group is for anyone who enjoys Non Fiction. Genres discussed here include Histories, Autobiographies, Biographies, Memoirs, Science and Technolog ...more
EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club
— 28761 members
— last activity 1 hour, 2 min ago
Click HERE for the latest group announcements. "It reminded me of ____ but in space." "I read ____ in high school, and actually liked it." "It's ...more
Constant Reader
— 6022 members
— last activity 9 hours, 24 min ago
A forum for friendly discussion of classics, literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry and short stories. We also love movies and art. Don't ask to join th ...more
All About Books
— 3809 members
— last activity 23 hours, 48 min ago
We're here because we like reading and we like chatting about reading. But we are here especially because we strongly believe that reading is not just ...more
Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)
— 16248 members
— last activity 9 minutes ago
The world is made up of two kinds of people: first, those who love classics, and second, those who have not yet read a classic. Be bold and join us as ...more
spoko’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at spoko’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
3,582 books
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134 friends
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131 friends
1,587 books
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288 friends
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