The history handed down to us is what white men did in the daytime.
Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?
The scientist, like the magician, possesses secrets. A secret — expertise — is somehow perceived as antidemocratic, and therefore ought to be unnatural
When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.
Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.
Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.
The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit.
It takes a long time to grow an old friend.
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
blabbercasters
Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.
Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.
Military people have a heavy investment in rules against torture, not only because we want to protect our own POWs from reciprocal brutalities … but also because war is so terrible that it desperately requires any limits anyone can agree on, any gesture toward dignity, any mitigation suggesting civilized scruple. There isn’t even persuasive evidence that torture makes its victims tell their secrets, instead of saying whatever we want to hear.
John Leonard (born 1965) is an Australian poet.
