no. 1106

 "The founding fathers mistrusted government power, and they had very good reason to, as do we. This is why they tried to institutionalize the separation of powers, the right to think, the right to speak, to be heard, to assemble, to complain to the government about its abuses, to be able to vote or impeach malefactors out of office.

John Stuart Mill talked eloquently in his essay "On Liberty" on the importance of free speech, of vigorous interaction. Let me just make one quote here from On Liberty:

"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generations, those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit: the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error."

Despite our best efforts, some things we believe are probably wrong. We certainly are very keen on recognizing the errors of past times and other nations. Why should our nation, why should our time, be different? If there are things that we believe, if there are institutions in our society that are in error, imperfectly conceived or executed, these are potential impediments to our survival. How do we find the errors? How do we correct them?

I maintain: with courage, the scientific method, and the Constitution. Sooner or later, every abuse of power must confront the Constitution. The only question is how much damage has been done in the interim."

Carl Sagan "Science and Civil Liberties" (ACLU of Illinois Lecture, 1987)

no. 1105

 “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”

-Justice Sonia Sotomayor

no. 1104

 “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That is Fascism: ownership of the government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling power.”

 Franklin Delano Roosevelt

no. 1103

 "The issue of government has always been whether individual men and women will have to serve some system of government and economics, or whether a system of government and economics exists to serve individual men and women." 

FDR, 1932

no. 1102

 So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

George Orwell, 1984 

no. 1101

 

C. S. Lewis,  “The Screwtape Letters”

no. 1100

 "We humans are newcomers, arising only a few million years ago. Our present technical civilization is just a few hundred years old. We have not had much recent experience in voluntary interspecies cooperation. We are very devoted to the short-term and hardly ever think about the long-term. There is no guarantee that we will be wise enough to understand our planetwide closed ecological system, or to modify our behavior in accord with that understanding." 

Carl Sagan ; Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

no. 1099

 “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.”

A. Whitney Griswold

no. 1098

 “Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.” 

Mignon McLaughlin (1963)

no. 1097

 "The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."

- James Baldwin

no. 1096

 A New Declaration of Independence from Tyranny: Effective July 4, 2025

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to break from a leader who governs with cruelty, contempt, and corruption, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed with inherent dignity and unalienable rights—among these are life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of justice.

That to secure these rights, governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. When a leader becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right and duty of the people to refuse allegiance and to stand united in the defense of their freedoms.

The current holder of high office has shown himself to be unfit to lead a free and just society.

* He disrespects women, mocking survivors of violence and stripping away their rights.

* He fuels racism and white supremacy, scapegoating communities of color and denying their equality.

* He assaults free speech, attacking the press, punishing dissent, and spreading disinformation.

* He exploits public office for private gain, enriching himself and the billionaire class while abandoning the poor and working people.

* He undermines justice, ignores the rule of law, and places himself above accountability.

* He disregards science, endangering lives in times of crisis and sacrificing the planet for profit.

* He fans division and incites violence to maintain power, wielding fear as a weapon against the people.

Time and again, we have protested peacefully, spoken truthfully, and appealed to our shared humanity. We have been met with indifference, hostility, and violence. A leader who governs through hatred and greed is unfit to govern at all.

Therefore, we, the people of conscience and conviction, do solemnly declare our independence from this tyrant and all he represents.

We withdraw our consent.

We refuse to be complicit in cruelty.

We reject the abuse of power for personal gain.

We stand for dignity, truth, equality, and justice for all people.

With firm reliance on each other and unwavering hope in our collective strength,

We pledge to resist oppression in all its forms,

To uphold the rights of the vulnerable,

And to build a future grounded in compassion, courage, and shared humanity.

Let this declaration be both a breaking and a beginning.

Andy Borowitz

no. 1095

 "There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe both the outside and the inside universe without studying it. The 'best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations.

In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us."

Carl Sagan ; Broca's Brain 

no. 1094

 "There is a generation of men and women for whom, in their youth, the planets were unimaginably distant points of light, and the Moon was the paradigm of the unattainable. Those same men and women, in middle life, have seen their fellows walk upon the surface of the Moon; in their old age, they will likely see men wandering along the dusty surface of Mars, their journeys illuminated by the battered face of Phobos. There is only one generation of humans in the ten million-year history of mankind that will live through such a transition. That generation is alive today."

Carl Sagan ; The Cosmic Connection 

no. 1093

 "We have a kind of fear of science and part of the reason is that science is able to show what constitutes a wrong, and unlike some other fields where no matter what you say might be right, here in science you can actually make a mistake and have to defend your view to other people who can actually draw upon facts to disprove it. So it makes some people nervous, the people who want the world to conform to their wishes rather than to the universe's own internal reality."

Carl Sagan (Talk of the Nation : Science Friday NPR)

no. 1092

 "What surprises me most about humankind is that we get bored of our childhood, rush to grow up, and long to be children again. That we lose our health to make money and then lose our money to restore our health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, we forget the present, such that we live in neither the present nor the future. That we live as if we'll never die and die as though we've never lived."

~Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

no. 1091

 “There could be a happy world, where cooperation was more in evidence than competition, and monotonous work is done by benevolent and beneficent machines, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of pain. There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.”

— Bertrand Russell, Last Essay: 1967

no. 1090

  “The only freedom left in the 21st Century is to be incommunicado.”

James Marden in a voiceover from a deleted scene in the movie Interstate 60.

no. 1089

 

no. 1088

 “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird.

no. 1087

 “Do not leave the pursuit of creativity in your heart up to the whims of capitalism.”

Jason K. Pargin