Magazine Posts

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) British philosopher, writer, mathematician, logician, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel Laureate. More

Edmund Burke ( 1729 – 1797)  British and Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of parliament in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. He was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. Read more

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist and poet. He was a key figure in Spanish language and universal literature.

Avram Noam Chomsky, born in 1928 is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s. More Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media. More

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” Virginia Woolf wrote some years before she filled her coat-pockets with stones, waded into the River Ouse near her house, and, unwilling to endure what she had barely survived in the past, slid beneath the smooth surface of life."  More at The Marginalian ➜

William Orville Douglas (1898 – 1980) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States for 36 years from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views and as a strong defender of the First Amendment. Born in Maine, Minnesota, Douglas moved west with his family to California and then to Yakima, Washington after the death of his father. He chaired  the Securities and Exchange Commission before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is the longest-serving justice in history to date.

Quote Source: Douglas delivered this message in a talk to the Authors Guild Council in New York on December 3, 1951. He received the 1951 Lauterbach Award for his defense of civil liberties at the event, according to the American Library Association. 

Jacque Fresco (1916 – 2017) was an American futurist and self-described social engineer. He left home at the age of 14 and was Self-taught, He worked in a variety of positions related to industrial design. Fresco wrote and lectured his views on sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural-resource management, cybernetic technology, automation, and the role of science in society. He was the founder of the Venus Project a still active non-profit organization that advocates for a resource-based economy and redesigns civilization.

Image source: Maj Borg, Minttu Mäntynen, Andrea Miconi, CC BY 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography : "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821) French Philosopher, moralist writer, lawyer, diplomat, and magistrate. One of the forefathers of conservatism, Maistre advocated social hierarchy French monarchy in the period immediately following the French Revolution. He wrote On the Pope (1819) and Letters on the Spanish Inquisition.Despite his close personal and intellectual ties with France, Maistre was throughout his life a subject of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which he served as a member of the Savoy Senate, ambassador to the Russian Empire and minister of state to the court in Turin. More

Kara Kondo (1916 -2005) American, of Japanese ancestry (Nisei), born in Wapato, Yakima valley, Washington where she spent her childhood. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, at 27 years of age she was removed to the North Portland Assembly Center, Oregon, and then to the Heart Mountain concentration camp, Wyoming. Kondo was on the staff of the camp newspaper, the Heart Mountain Sentinel. Left camp for Chicago, Illinois, and lived in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Missouri before returning to Yakima, Washington. Became involved in political organization postwar, such as the League of Women Voters. Testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians during the redress movement, and became actively involved in groups addressing environmental issues.  Kara Kondo Interview - "The Day of Mass Removal" 

Hannah Arendt ( 1906 - 1975 ) German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names, and schools, amongst other things. More