a shandean commonplace book

In order to improve, our definition of what it means to be human must include recognising the horrors we are capable of in societies of past and present. The systematic oppression of others and the massacre of billions of animals were done by human beings. Us. We can become better only if we realise that besides all the wonders, this is us too and it can happen again if we don’t change the ways we live together.   from The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.  Arundhati Roy

A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life.                        David Hume

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Education”

Each act of tenderness amends the violence of history. Toi Derricote

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. James Baldwin

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties . . . . John Adams, Massachussetts constitution

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. Franklin D. Roosevelt

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons. Desmond Tutu

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong. John Kenneth Galbraith

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself Tolstoy