Rethinking Howard Zinn

While reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power a couple years ago, I came across some information that required consideration. In the book Coates addresses some remarks made by Howard Zinn regarding the Civil War, which Coates had written about for The Atlantic. These are Zinn’s comments, made a few months before he…

We shall have to be philosophers, Mary

Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable—bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. You might…

“To be able to perform music for yourself is a wonderful thing.”

Written Saturday, April 16, 2011, while staying with my family. This morning I’m reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and listening to my brother downstairs playing the piano. I’ve always been jealous of his skill. I taught myself to play the piano as a kid, and had only a month or two of lessons in high school….

Favorite Quotes from Books

This is another Top Ten Tuesday I’m reposting from my old blog, although only a few of the quotes are actually from that original post. All but the last few are from books I’ve read (ending with the Mindy Kaling quote); those few are ones I came across elsewhere that really affected me, and are probably what made…

Who would we complain to, anyway?

“I gazed at Kobe harbour, sparkling leadenly far below, and listened carefully, hoping to pick up some echoes from the past, but nothing came to me. Just the sounds of silence. That’s all. But what are you going to do? We’re talking about things that happened over thirty years ago. “Over thirty years ago. There is…

Howl

. . . who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup . . . Allen Ginsberg I did not care much for his poetry, I have to be honest. But this is just such a perfect string of words.

The doctors who started the abortion reform movement in the 1940s were the furthest thing from feminists, radical or mainstream. One thing about doctors—they don’t like to see their patients die, especially when it’s not nature that’s killing them. It’s the law. Once abortion became safe—indeed, safer than childbirth—after World War II, doctors started noticing…

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. Galileo Galilei, letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615

I never use the words humanist or humanitarian, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature. Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The nature of work has been a major area of new understanding, beginning with the word itself. Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style. Though still alarmingly common, the term is being protested, especially by…

Nature . . . is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense–experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to…