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Gladwyn d'Souza's avatar

James Baldwin: “A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless”- The Fire Next Time.

“The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.” From “The White Problem,” published in Robert A. Goodwin’s edited volume 100 Years of Emancipation.

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Constantine Markides's avatar

And one more Mencken classic: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

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