Russ

Human history, on the other hand, is about the changing ways in which the same species has organized to meet its needs.

Almost everything that has happened in my writing life has been the result of keeping my head down and doing the work.

It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.

The dialectic was based on two assumptions. First, that “all things are contradictory in themselves.” Secondly, that “contradiction is at the root of all movement and life, and it is only insofar as it contains a contradiction that anything moves and has impulse and activity.”

Capitalism, for Marx, is a world in which the worker is dominated by the products of his labor, which have taken on the shape of an alien being, capital.