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41 " What drives pure reason to efforts that seem to have neither end nor result? "
― Susan Neiman , Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
42 " Is reality exhausted by what is, or does it leave room for all that could be? "
43 " The line from Southern hatred of Reconstruction to Southern opposition to government programs is a straight one, though it’s rarely explicitly drawn. So Mississippi prefers potholes that can ruin your wheels in its capital, and schools that leave their graduates illiterate in its countryside, to imposing taxes that might fix them. "
― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
44 " I have always been wary of Black History Months and women’s studies departments, believing they confine their subjects to reconstructed ghettos. Of interest to black people. Good work for a woman. Those are the unspoken but absolute assumptions such programs unintentionally reinforce. I want to live in a world where everyone who studies American history reads Frederick Douglass and everyone who studies English reads George Eliot—just to stay with the nineteenth century. If they are cloistered, another generation will grow up thinking they can learn American history without Douglass, English literature without Eliot. Intellectual segregation is no better than any other kind. "
45 " The historian Howard Zinn’s remarks about the South make sense: it is “not the antithesis but the essence of American society which could therefore function as a mirror in which the nation can see its own blemishes magnified.”6 If the South is a mirror, Mississippi is a microscope. "
46 " Clearly the students had been learning about racism—far away, and in another country "
47 " not only deprives workers of the fruits of their labour by paying them 1/200th of the salary that goes to their CEO (the international average as of this writing, not including bonuses and stock options); it deprives workers of the very meaning of labour itself "
― Susan Neiman , Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
48 " Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols, and many symbols involve remembering the dead. Which heroes do we valorize, which victims do we mourn? The United States has hundreds of monuments depicting a noble-looking Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army. In 2018, Bryan Stevenson dedicated a national monument to honor the victims of lynching, but where are the national monuments to the freedom fighter John Brown—or at least to Harriet Tubman? There are no monuments to the Nazis in Germany, East or West, but only after reunification did West Germany build significant monuments to the victims. "
49 " By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have learned it: the world is not your world, and you don’t have another. (p.107) "
50 " What we rarely see receive is a picture of adulthood that represents it as the ideal it should be. (...) What better way to keep people longing for childhood than to paint a picture of adulthood no right-minded soul could ever want? "
51 " While systematic racism infects processes and affects lives all over America, Southern awareness of history makes it impossible to ignore. Moreover, the influence of the South on American political culture is disproportionate to the size of the region. Focusing on the Deep South is not a matter of ignoring the rest of the country, but "
52 " If the right to happiness is not an idle piece of wishful thinking but a demand of reason, the consequences can be revolutionary. "
53 " Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it. "
54 " It’s a matter of logical structure: what is, just is, and any claim about what ought to be is a claim about our own wishes and desires. Why ever should we imagine that the two would be related? "
55 " His mother claims she didn’t know anything about the racist terror going on in Mississippi and Alabama; she was caught up in joining a sorority, not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world. Or around the corner. "
56 " Just how much life is left in Confederate ghosts became clear to the world, at the latest, with the election of Donald J. Trump. "
57 " The claim that there is no alternative but perdition to a worldview that shows how everything fits together and makes perfect sense is a mark of fundamentalism, whether of religious or market variety. In a child, such moments are appealing, necessary and usually harmless. "
58 " She was ten years old. “That’s about the age when people start deforming their consciences in order to accept something that’s not just manifestly wrong but manifestly contrary to the religious beliefs that are front and center in their lives.” Like Bettina Stangneth or Jan Philipp Reemtsma or David Person, Diane McWhorter cannot say why her conscience resisted attempts to deform it. "
59 " Sometimes realism seems to mean no more than the advice to plan ahead before you start a war. Sometimes realism means the recognition that the world cannot be divided as neatly into good and evil as George W. Bush's more notorious speeches would suggest. Sometimes realism means nothing more than cynical or even bad, which leaves ultrarealist to mean simply very bad. So ultrarealist methods include 'torture, kidnapping, aggressive war, indifference to civilian casualties, and contempt for democratically expressed international opinion.' Ultrarealism? What assumptions have you made about reality?..This realism is about as ethical as power is soft. Appeals to the magic of capitalism not withstanding, what underpins these views are the residues of that Marxism that sees no difference between idealism and ideology. To understand what has gone wrong in recent years, and provide a basis for doing better in the future, we must be clear about the difference between them. "
― Susan Neiman , Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists
60 " The desire for regional innocence is so powerful that every single Klan witness at the Birmingham bombing trial in 2001 said under oath that he never had any bad feelings about black people. "