responsibility, n.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).
A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
Hannah Arendt, interview with French writer Roger Errera (1974), New York Review of Books.
Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita, in the documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), characterizing his thoughts upon the successful detonation of the first atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan’s drama Oppenheimer (2023) is in first-release theatrical competition with the fantasy-comedy Barbie (2023) this month.
WHATEVER YOU DO, TELL THE TRUTH.
Presidential candidate Stephen Grover Cleveland’s telegram response to a query as to what the Democratic Party should say about reports that he fathered a child out of wedlock. The issue was scandalous, but he won office and his first term in the presidency of the United States started in 1885.
The remnants of slavery and colonialism are ubiquitous. Slavery has been systemically embedded in the deep structure of world history, etched into the human experience since the dawn of civilization.
David Martin Jones & M. L. R. Smith, The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), p. 1.
The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorothy Parker, interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture (1970).
Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.
John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), as quoted in John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom, whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country; nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretenses of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).
This passage was used as an epigraph by John Abramson in his book Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It (2022).