The Past Can Be Used To Renew

There Seems To Be Something In Humanity Which Will Not Bow Meekly To The Insolence Of Power.

The Government Spokesman Announces That There Is No Truth In The Charges Of Widespread Corruption Within The Cabinet; Nobody Believes Him; He Knows That Nobody Believes Him, We Know That He Knows It, And He Knows It Too.

A Socialist Is Just Someone Who Is Unable To Get Over His Or Her Astonishment That Most People Who Have Lived And Died Have Spent Lives Of Wretched, Fruitless, Unremitting Toil.

What Persuades Men And Women To Mistake Each Other From Time To Time For Gods Or Vermin Is Ideology. One Can Understand Well Enough How Human Beings May Struggle And Murder For Good Material Reasons - Reasons Connected, For Instance, With Their Physical Survival. It Is Much Harder To Grasp How They May Come To Do So In The Name Of Something As Apparently Abstract As Ideas. Yet Ideas Are What Men And Women Live By, And Will Occasionally Die For.

Reading Is Not A Straightforward Linear Movement, A Merely Cumulative Affair: Our Initial Speculations Generate A Frame Of Reference Within Which To Interpret What Comes Next, But What Comes Next May Retrospectively Transform Our Original Understanding, Highlighting Some Features Of It And Backgrounding Others.