November 26, 1792, saw the birth of Sarah Moore Grimké, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the elder sister of the equally famed Angelina Emily Grimké Weld.
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A Grimké Birthday
Author: Redactor
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Kurt Vonnegut
“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
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Baruch Spinoza
“If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune. No doubt there are usually more and sharper quarrels between parents and children, than between masters and slaves; yet it advances not the art of household management to change a father’s right into a right of property, and count children but as slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, is furthered by handing the whole authority to one man.”
Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus (1677; translated by A. H. Gosset, 1883), Ch. 6, Of Monarchy
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John Milton
“Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”
John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644
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Happy Birthday, Baruch!
November 24th marks the birthdays of philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632) and three influential Americans: ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1868), self-help writer Dale Carnegie (1888), and conservative editor, writer, and television personality William F. Buckley Jr. (1925).
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C. S. Lewis
“And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943
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Areopagitica
On November 23, 1644, British poet John Milton published Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.
Government is supposed to defend our rights, including rights to property. Too often, our police departments merely steal. Play criminal themselves. Click on over to Townhall.com for the full story. Come back here for more reading . . . and viewing:
- Institute for Justice – TAKEN: New Report Finds Civil Forfeiture Laws Are Fueling Explosive Growth in Property Seizures
- Institute for Justice report – Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture
- Washington Post – Most Americans don’t realize it’s this easy for police to take your cash
- YouTube – Policing for Profit Visualized: How Big Is Civil Forfeiture?
- Washington Post – Radley Balko: The Booming Business of Asset Forfeiture
- Watchdog.org – CA’s bright spot on civil asset forfeiture overshadowed by federal entanglements
- New York Post – Jacob Sullum: Lame excuses for letting the cops be robbers
- Washington Post – Radley Balko: How much civil asset forfeiture will Holder’s new policy actually prevent?
- Washington Free Beacon – Feds Take $4.5 Billion Worth of Private Property From Americans in 2014
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Lewis, Huxley, Burgess
November 22 marks the death dates of a number of eminent writers, including that of British-American novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley and Irish-British novelist, theologian and medieval scholar C.S. Lewis, both of whom died in 1963, the same day as the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. British novelist Anthony Burgess died exactly 30 years later.
The date also marks the birth of the great British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), in 1819.
Recommended reading from these authors include:
Silas Marner (1861), a short and brilliant novel by George Eliot.
Earthly Powers (1980), a massive novel about life in the 20th century, by the ever-iconoclastic and hard-to-pin-down Anthony Burgess.
“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949) and Till We Have Faces (1956), the former being C.S. Lewis’s thoughtful essay on the nature of modern tyranny, and the latter being what some regard his best novel, a retelling of the Psyche myth.
Brave New World (1931) and Brave New World Revisited (1958), the former is Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian satire on technological tyranny, and the latter is the author’s survey of the issues raised by — and the degrees to which reality conforms to — his earlier fictional prophecy.
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John Milton
“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644