This is the fifty-sixth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
The dramatic events in the United States during January and February 2025 weigh heavily on this installment of Other People’s Thoughts. For more on the Trump era, in particular T2, see our Contra Trump miniseries.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
29 March 2025
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Other People’s Thoughts I-LV:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LVI
And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
— from Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History
Be careful. When a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.
— Albert Camus
Hitler’s Government
I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.
— British Ambassador to Berlin to the Foreign Secretary, 30 June 1933
Nero’s Court
Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine. … We were at war with a dictator, we are now at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.’
— Claude Malhuret, French Senator
The Oval Office, annex to the Kremlin
For the first time, Trump told the cocaine clown the truth to his face. The Kyiv regime is playing with World War III, and the ungrateful pig got a firm slap from the masters of the pigsty. This is useful, but not enough—the military aid to the Nazi machine must be stopped.
— Dmitry Medvedev, vice chairman of the Russian Security Council
Your Excellency Mr President
We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenski with fear and distaste. We consider your expectations to show respect and gratitude for the material help provided by the United States fighting Russia to Ukraine insulting. Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the frontline for more than 11 years in the name of these values and independence of their Homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see it.
Our panic was also caused by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of one we remember well from Security Service interrogations and from the debate rooms in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges at the behest of the all-powerful communist political police also explained to us that they hold all the cards and we hold none. They demanded us to stop our business, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffer because of us. They deprived us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government and our gratitude. We are shocked that Mr. President treated Volodymyr Zelenski in the same way.
The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to keep its distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up being a threat to themselves. This was understood by President Woodrow Wilson, who decided to join the United States in World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this, deciding after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the war for the defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific, but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial commitment it would not have been possible to bring the collapse of the Soviet Union empire. President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with freedom. His greatness was m. in. [sic] on the fact that he without hesitation called the USSR the “Empire of Evil” and gave it a decisive fight. We won, and the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands today in Warsaw vis a vis of the US embassy.
Mr. President, material aid — military and financial — cannot be equivalent to the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, as well as the whole free world. Human life is priceless, its value cannot be measured with money. Gratitude is due to those who make the sacrifice of blood and freedom. It is obvious for us, the people of “Solidarity”, former political prisoners of the communist regime serving Soviet Russia.
We are calling for the United States to withdraw from the guarantees it made with the Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which recorded a direct obligation to defend the intact borders of Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons resources. These guarantees are unconditional: there is no word about treating such aid as an economic exchange.
— signed Lech Wałęsa, former. political prisoner, Solidarity leader,
president of the Republic of Poland III, and others
We see that there are real consequences to Trump’s admiration of and fascination with the world’s dictators, autocrats, and strongmen; that it’s not just a rhetorical preference. It’s become an actual foreign-policy direction for the country, which represents a radical shift in America’s postwar view of the world.
—Susan B. Glasser, Trump and Zelensky’s Stunning Fight, The New Yorker, 28 Feburary 2025
Protests only work when the government’s conduct defies popular expectations. How do you build a protest movement in a country that now expects, and accepts, lunacy?
— Nick Cataggio, Where are the protests?, 26 February 2025
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
— Mark Twain
AmerExit
The only thing that matters now, is to gather the political will to disentangle our continent from an unreliable and dangerous partner — and gain the time to do that safely. We have to bite the inside of our cheek, smile sweetly and say ‘yes dear’, while preparing our escape.
— Alex Andreou, X, 2 March 2025
Pity the stewards of Australian foreign policy watching, hair standing on end, as the Trump administration courts autocrats, attacks allies and tosses facts and reason, like old cigarette butts, out of the careening, post-truth MAGA motorcade.
US President Donald Trump’s unpredictability and the wild “burn it all down” mood that has gripped Washington make forecasting the next few years especially difficult. But Trump appears to want a new world order that privileges strong powers, whether democratic or totalitarian. Such a world will be lonelier and more dangerous for Australia.
— Richard Maude, Trump’s new world order: Australia’s Indo-Pacific destiny is up for grabs, Australian Financial Review, 11 March 2025
Megalopolis
I am thrilled to accept the Razzie award in so many important categories for @megalopolisfilm, and for the distinctive honor of being nominated as the worst director, worst screenplay, and worst picture at a time when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking!
In this wreck of a world today, where ART is given scores as if it were professional wrestling, I chose to NOT follow the gutless rules laid down by an industry so terrified of risk that despite the enormous pool of young talent at its disposal, may not create pictures that will be relevant and alive 50 years from now.
What an honor to stand alongside a great and courageous filmmaker like Jacques Tati who impoverished himself completely to make one of cinema’s most beloved failures, PLAYTIME! My sincere thanks to all my brilliant colleagues who joined me to make our work of art, MEGALOPOLIS, and let us remind ourselves us that box-office is only about money, and like war, stupidity and politics has no true place in our future.
— Francis Ford Coppola, recipient of a 2025 Razzie for Worst Director and Worst Screenplay
Mars Derangement Syndrome
One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth’s biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening to, for example, the reality that there is an inexcusable, untenable cost to shipping coffee beans all around the world from the relatively narrow belt in which they grow so that everybody can have a hot cup o’ joe every morning. Or that the planet is being heated and poisoned by people’s expectation of cheap steaks and year-round tomatoes and a new iPhone every year, and that as a consequence its water-cycle and weather systems are unraveling. Smearing the natural world flat and pouring toxic waste across it so that every American can drive a huge car from their too-large air-conditioned freestanding single-family home to every single other place they might choose to go turns out to be incompatible with the needs of basically all the other life we’ve ever detected in the observable universe. Whoops!
All of what makes, say, the lifestyle of your average McMansion owner in Ashburn, Va. anathema to life, writ large, applies a billionfold to each person in a theoretical Mars colony. Their carbon footprints would be the size of entire nations, by the time they even pressed the first normal human-sized actual footprint into the red planet’s sterile frozen regolith. Shipping a pound of coffee from the Bean Belt to Connecticut is nothing at all compared to shipping flour to goddamn Mars.
— Albert Burneko, Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars, Defector, 11 September 2024
Tesla
RUD: Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.
‘Evidently a Nazi’
“I just refuse to believe it was an accidental two-time Sieg Heil. And he does it at a presidential inauguration!”
“This is why I hate liberals,” Burr continued. “Liberals have no teeth whatsoever. They just go, ‘Oh my God, can you believe this? I’m getting out of the country!’ I’m just like, you’re gonna leave the country because of one guy with dyed hair plugs and a laminated face? Who makes a bad car and has an obsolete social media platform? Why doesn’t he leave? Why are we so afraid of this guy who can’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag?”
— Bill Burr Calls Elon Musk an Idiot, Slams Liberals for Being Afraid, Variety, 11 March 2025
He is, in short, a capital “R” Ret@rd.
And yet…one individual keeps pulling me back into that turgid swamp we call “discourse.” A man so venal, dull, perverted, and cringe, that I cannot look away from his Daffy Duck style splutterings without feeling like Elmer Fudd (in want of a HUGE gun.)
That man is Elon Musk — a Nazi, a nonce, and a nincompoop — a “bad” autistic — a ret@rd — who I hope [REDACTED], violently, soon.
… having turned twitter into a Boer racebait forum, and having gone mask-off white-supremacist crypto-currency crypto-fascist, we’ve had to see a lot more of Elon Musk. His performances on the campaign trail last year were a study in anti-charisma — a blackhole of charm and likability, blithering and bloviating like the ketamine and speed that keep him going were running a train on his already fragile frontal lobe — a gelatinous prolapse of chinless grotesquery, detonating dumbfuckery as his cars detonate their passengers, a balls-to-the-wall nimrod of the first order, whose impossible wealth and incestuous mothering has left him slack-jawed, malformed, and rotten, like a Hapsburg princeling raised on Stormfront, web rips of fatal industrial accidents, “barely legal” totally illegal pornography, Adderall, CoD, and, worst yet, Afrikaans.
He is a repugnance ripped straight from a Troma movie, a gormless Cenobite, who makes the jump-scare ghoulies of the late David Lynch’s filmography look downright huggable.
He is, in short, a capital “R” Ret@rd.
— Patrick Marlborough, The Ret@rd, The Yeah Nah Review, 23 January 2025
Daddy dearest
He’s a pathetic man-child. Why would I feel scared of him? Ohhh, he has so much power. Nah, nah, nah. I don’t give a f**k. Why should I be scared of this man? Because he’s rich? Oh, no, I’m trembling. Ooh, shivering in my boots here. I don’t give a f**k how much money anyone has. I don’t. I really don’t. He owns Twitter. Okay. Congratulations.
People thrive off of fear. I’m not giving anyone that space in my mind. The only thing that gets to live free in my mind are drag queens.
— Vivian Jenna Wilson on Elon Musk, Teen Vogue, 20 March 2025
Not my Favourite Martian
In a saner society, a rich guy with Musk’s well-known and unapologetically expounded views would sooner find himself under a guillotine than atop a space agency with the power to dragoon the world’s resources into his k-hole John Galt cosplay. The certainty that he will never make another planet habitable is no comfort to the rest of us, when in the act of trying he may do the opposite to this one. The doomsday scenario is coming from inside the house. I hope he dies on Mars.
— Albert Burneko, Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars, Defector, 11 September 2024
The Australian Writer
In embarking on a career of self-perpetuating cuckdom, the Australian writer agrees to debase themselves for a readership whose clawing lowness is only outdone by the snake-belly-slither of our pay. We are here to sell 48 books to lorazepam zonked wine mums at a writer’s festival hosted by ABC RN’s least fireable Whitlam-era sex-pest, and we should be grateful for the privilege. We are here to sink four years into a master’s degree where an author of detective fiction written to stock the waiting rooms at family courts across the nation sits in judgement of what classifies as ‘interesting’ prose. We are here to get retweeted by a 21yo polycule furry with an axe to grind who is cancelling us for not doing a proper tribute to “The Crystals” before watching our little cousin’s longplay of Sonic Frontiers. We are here to write books for a nation of gambling-app addicts and middle-class middle-aged middle-management email-job G Flip aficionados, and if they don’t leave us at least ten three star reviews on goodreads with insights like “don’t like books with stairs in them,” we should bite down on our Giramondo issued Gerald Murnane branded (I am imagining an ecstasy pill that looks like Gerald Murnane, ngl) back molar cyanide capsule.
It is, undoubtedly, an ignoble life.
In an endless boot camp for reputation rehab
With her unerring instinct for getting it wrong, Meghan has come out with a show about fake perfection just when the zeitgeist has turned raucously against it. Trump’s America is a foulmouthed and disheveled cultural place where podcasters in sweaty T-shirts, crotch-rot jeans, and headphones achieve world domination on YouTube. The real person of the moment is Pamela Anderson with her proudly wan bare face. As early as 2015, the lifestyle OG Martha Stewart understood the tide was turning against over-produced flawlessness when, as she put it, she dug herself out of “a fucking hole” of Martha hate by trash-talking her own mistakes at a Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber. Meghan, on the other hand, has never figured out a convincing persona. Masquerading as an influencer, she’s the ultimate follower, which inevitably means she is behind the curve.
— Tina Brown, Meghan’s Buzzkill, Fresh Hell, 10 March 2025
The Philosophical Policeman
‘Freedom… What freedom are you talking about when you complain about being imprisoned? If there’s no freedom outside the prison, then the inside is no different. When you are complaining, it means there’s a freedom outside. There’s even a freedom to say “I want to divide this country; freedom and autonomy do not suffice, I want to rebel,” or whatever. You can’t deny this. The only thing you deny to yourself is the freedom to talk about the freedoms you live in, because your head, your heart, your thought is mortgaged. You are not free to tell this. You don’t have the freedom to tell that the freedoms you enjoy really exist. By destroying you as well as those who make you talk like that, we are trying to make you free, to save you from the separatists and their extensions. This is what we do. It is a very deep, very sophisticated job.’
— İdris Naim Şahin, Turkish Minister of the Interior, 2011
寧死不屈
作為老幫菜之一，我知道自己已經沒有能力去戰鬥，該做的只是保持正義感，不必去對不甘忍受霸凌的戰鬥者指手畫腳。人家比我們知道該怎麼做，即使戰鬥會失敗，難道需要我們說？寧死不屈正是人性的至尊光輝所在。到了過氣年齡的我們，如果人生還能保持什麼意義，一定不是聰明，而是尊嚴和對勇敢的尊敬。
— 王力雄，X，2025年3月13日
A Moral Treat
The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
— Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
If the solidarity of mankind is to be based on something more solid than the justified fear of man’s demonic capabilities, if the new universal neighborship of all countries is to result in something more promising than a tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else, then a process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification on a gigantic scale must take place.
— Hannah Arendt
The Stock Market
Here’s the interesting thing about the stock market: It cannot be indicted, arrested or deported; it cannot be intimidated, threatened or bullied; it has no gender, ethnicity or religion; it cannot be fired, furloughed or defunded; it cannot be primaried before the next midterm elections; and it cannot be seized, nationalized or invaded. It’s the ultimate voting machine, reflecting prospects for earnings growth, stability, liquidity, inflation, taxation and predictable rule of law.
— Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy for J.P. Morgan’s asset- and wealth-management business (JPM), 15 March 2025
A Caricature Stands in for a Complex Field of Study
Trump issued Executive Order 14168 on the first day of his second term in office. Nine days later, he signed Executive Order 14188, ‘Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism’, which draws attention to the ‘unprecedented wave of vile antisemitic discrimination, vandalism and violence against our citizens, especially in our schools and on our campuses’. It undertakes to ‘prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators’. On 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the US with a green card who participated in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza last year, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Trump posted online that ‘this is the first arrest of many to come.’ It may seem that the targeting of people protesting in support of Palestinian freedom has nothing to do with objections to ‘gender ideology’ and the government’s efforts to strip rights from trans people. The link appears, however, when we consider who, or what, is being figured as a threat to American society. Educational institutions and non-profit organisations, especially progressive ones, are at risk of losing their federal tax breaks if they collaborate on projects concerned with Palestine or fail to expel students who engage in spontaneous or ‘unauthorised’ protest. If the Heritage Foundation’s plans become official policy, institutions or organisations that fund work critical of the state of Israel – or, more precisely, work that could be construed as critical – will be deemed antisemitic and supportive of terrorism. If they fund work on race and gender, they will not merely be guilty of ‘wokism’ but regarded as antagonistic to the social order that now defines the United States – in other words, a threat to the nation.
What would be the nature of the ‘order’ restored if the Trump administration were successful? No funding for research or education without compliance with authoritarian demands; no tax exemption for non-profits; no place in the country for migrants or international students who dare to assert their rights. No healthcare for trans youth. Right-wing nationalist movements, when they incite hatred against migrants and trans people alike, call for a return to, or protection of, national cultures grounded in the supremacy of whiteness and the heteronormative family. Authoritarian regimes have increasingly resorted to a ‘gender scare’ as a way of deflecting from economic, ecological and social instability. The arguments mobilised against ‘gender ideology’ are like those used to oppose the study of ‘postcolonial theory’ in Germany or ‘critical race theory’ in the US; in each case, a caricature stands in for a complex field of study, while any actual scholarship in the field is ignored.
— Judith Butler, This Is Wrong, London Review of Books, 3 April 2025
Objects don’t die
Objects don’t die. Their journeys in this physical world, up to a certain point, are parallel to the trajectories of the humans to whom they belong. Then comes the moment when the separation happens. Vincent’s phone became a phone; James’s backpack, a backpack. They became objective objects, left behind in strangers’ hands.
— Yiyun Li, The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons, The New Yorker, 23 March 2025
Hooters
As I left, I found myself thinking about the irony of the Hooters mascot: that wide-eyed owl. The bird’s name is a juvenile jab, a wink to the mammary fixation that fuels the franchise. Yet, in Greek myth, the owl is a symbol of divine knowledge and reason. How fitting that it should preside over a place where the waitresses, far from being empty vessels of titillation, embody a savvy the oglers and mockers fail to appreciate. The Hooters owl, in its dual role as racy pun and all-knowing observer, mirrors the waitresses themselves. It’s a cosmic joke, really, that the bird should roost where wisdom is the last thing expected, yet often the first thing served.
— Peter Rotholetz, How Hooters Became a Refuge for Young Gay Men, The New York Times, 23 March 2025
‘I have only committed the mistake of believing in you, the Americans.’
On 12 April 1975, United States Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther Dean offered high officials of the Khmer Republic political asylum in the United States, but Sirik Matak, Long Boret, and Lon Non, along with other members of Lon Nol’s cabinet, declined — despite the names of Boret and Sirik Matak being published by the Khmer Rouge in a list of “Seven Traitors” marked for execution. Sirik Matak’s written response to the ambassador stated:
“Dear Excellency and friend,
I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.
As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave us and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.
But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed the mistake of believing in you, the Americans.
Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.
Prince Sirik Matak.
Signal Snafu
The Trump administration leaked its plans to bomb the Houthis by accidentally adding The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to a Signal group chat. This situation calls for humor, so we curated a mini-roundup of reactions from the Sinosphere. Enjoy!
From the Taiwanese platform PTT:
(Pushed) “I wonder what the American ancestors would think when they see these unworthy descendants.”
(Pushed) “I shouldn’t, but I really want to see the Indo-Pacific war plan leaked…”
(Pushed) “This is too ridiculous. Could it be because the reporter just happened to have the same name as the person they wanted?”Indeed, such an error would be more difficult to make in Chinese given the huge variety of characters used in Chinese names. FromWeibo:
American names are too simple. … 😂
This is truly an epic level of face-losing disgrace. (这是史诗级别的丢人现眼)
The following comments come from another Weibo post about Trump’s response to the leak:
“I don’t know, that didn’t happen” has hoodlum energy (無賴嘴臉)
Shameless people are invincible (人不要脸，天下无敌)
Another commenter in that thread invoked the phrase, “Not listening! Not listening! The turtle is chanting buddhist scriptures!” (不听不听王八念经). This meme is originally from a nursery rhyme satirizing people who shut down when confronted with an opposing viewpoint.
— ChinaTalk, 25 March 2025
Open Secret
We are currently clean on OPSEC. Godspeed to our Warriors.
— Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defence
Emoji Intelligence
Texting war plans to reporters is clearly bad. But the fact that America’s top leaders communicate about 40% via emojis is also freaking me out.
— Bill McKibben, 25 March 2025
Not Quitting Quiety
This evening now-former Skadden senior associate Brenna Trout Frey posted on LinkedIn her reasons for leaving the firm — and encouraged others to do the same.
Skadden Resignation
Today the executive partner of my former firm sent us all an “update” that attempted to convince some of the best minds in the legal profession that he did us a solid by capitulating to the Trump administration’s demands for fealty and protection money. Fellow Skadden attorneys: If you agree with Jeremy London’s position that the firm should not engage in “illegal DEI discrimination,” should devote prestigious Skadden Fellows to the Trump administration’s pet projects, and should help “politically disenfranchised groups who have not historically received legal representation from major national law firms,” (taking into account the robust pro bono work that major national law firms already do), then by all means continue working there. But if that email struck you as a craven attempt to sacrifice the rule of law for self-preservation, I hope you do some soul-searching over the weekend and join me in sending a message that this is unacceptable (in whatever way you can). As one of my more eloquent former colleagues put it: “Do not pretend that what is happening is normal or excusable. It isn’t.”
There is only one acceptable response from attorneys to the Trump administration’s demands: The rule of law matters.
The rule of law matters. As an attorney, if my employer cannot stand up for the rule of law, then I cannot ethically continue to work for them.
— Skadden Senior Associate Quits After Firm’s Craven Capitulation To Trump, Above the Law, 28 March 2025
In Dracula’s Image
“The irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God,” said [Bryan] Johnson. “We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If you just say: What have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics? We are building God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony is that the human storytelling got it exactly in the reverse, that we are the creators of God, and that we will create God in our own image.”
Marching Backward
Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!
— Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Durrow), played by Spencer Tracey, in Inherit the Wind (1960)
‘My own heart let me more have pity on’
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems (1918)