“Disillusion is what fits us for reality, whether in Plato’s terms or D.W. Winnicott’s. But then we must be assured that this promise is based on a true knowledge of what our illusions are.”
Stanley Cavell, 1984, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes.
“The alternative to our contemporary humanitarian culture of human rights is not doing nothing. It is doing something else – and perhaps something better.”
Samuel Moyn, 2014, Human Rights and the Uses of History.
“The extensiveness of power and its intensity are usually assumed to be conversely related, increase one and the other diminishes or lessens. No such assumption holds, however, when topology enters the frame. Reach, when grasped topologically, is more about presence than distance; it is intensive rather than extensive, a relational arrangement where power composes the spaces of which it is a part by stretching, folding, or distorting relationships to place certain outcomes within or beyond reach.”
John Allen, 2016, Topologies of Power: Beyond Territory and Networks.
“I’ve avoided judgments about the adequacy of any mode of representation, not taking any of them as the yardstick against which all other methods should be judged. Nor have I adopted the slightly more relativistic position that, while the jobs to be done may differ, there is a best way of doing each kind of job. That isn’t relativistic asceticism on my part either. It seems more useful, more likely to lead to new understanding of representations, to think of every way of representing social reality as perfect – for something. The question is, what something is it good for?”
Howard Becker, 2007, Telling About Society.
“One of the founding insights of feminist criticism has been to point out that the idealized, beloved woman is often described as an object, a thing, rather than a subject. But perhaps the problem with being used arises from an inequality of power rather than from something inherently unhealthy about willingly playing the role of thing. Indeed, what if the capacity to become a subject were something that could best be learned from an object?”
Barbara Johnson, 2008, Persons and Things.
“It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary.”
Orlando Figes, 2014, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991.
“Strong as was Lyndon Johnson’s compassion for the poor, particularly poor people of color, his deep, genuine desire to help them had always been subordinate to his ambition; whenever they had been in conflict, it had been compassion that went to the wall. When they had both been pointing in the same direction, however – when the compassion had been unleashed from ambition’s checkrein – then not only Lyndon Johnson but the cause of social justice in America had moved forward under the direction of this master of transmuting sympathy into governmental action.”
Robert Caro, 2012, The Years of London Johnson, Volume 4: The Passage of Power.
“Throughout LBJ’s life, in every institution of which he had been a part, a similar pattern had emerged: as he rose to power within the institution, and then, as he consolidated that power, he was humble – deferential, obsequious, in fact. And then, as the power was consolidated, solid, when he was in power and confident of staying there, he became, with dramatic speed and contrast, overbearing, domineering.”
Robert Caro, 2002, The Years of London Johnson, Volume 3: Master of the Senate.
“Understanding political power in a democracy requires understanding elections.’
Robert Caro, 1990, The Years of London Johnson, Volume 2: Means of Ascent.
“The grass had grown not over a season but over centuries. It wouldn’t have grown at all had it not been for fire – prairie fires set by lightning and driven by wind across tens of thousands of acres, and fires set by Indians to stampede game into their ambushes or over cliffs – for fire clears the land of underbrush, relentless enemy of grass. […] Even with the aid of fire, the grass had grown slowly – agonizingly slowly. […] It had grown slowly because the soil beneath it was so thin.”
Robert Caro, 1982, The Years of London Johnson, Volume 1: The Path to Power.
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