The dictatorship’s mistake was to torture but not kill.
— Jair Bolsonaro, Radio interview, 2016I won’t get voted out of office.
— Bill Gates, Bill Moyer Interviews Bill GatesI hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life.
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, International Publishers Co; Reprint, 1989 edition (November 24, 1971)The sadist needs the person over whom he rules, he needs him very badly, since his own feeling of strength is rooted in the fact that he is the master over someone.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, Holt Paperbacks; Owl Book ed edition, September 15, 1994
Years ago Robert Bly talked about Ronald Reagan’s capacity for lying. He said Reagan grew up lying about his father, an alcoholic, and his dysfunctional childhood which he routinely described as happy. How the enormity of that lie, and all the attendant pressures of such intimate dishonesty made lying about the Iran/Contra deal much easier. And I recently heard Gabor Mate say the same sort of thing about Donald Trump. How Trump grew up with an abusive authoritarian father, one who humiliated and belittled the boy Trump, and the world of that boy was one of cruelty and abuse. And if that is the only world you know growing up, that is the world you will see everywhere around you later. And the only way to navigate a world of…