Sublime

Le Bon’s 1895 book The Crowd might be one of the most influential in history—not because of how many read it, but because of who read it. Hitler, Lenin, and especially Mussolini were all heavily influenced by his study of mass psychology, explicitly so.

In recent years a new anti-monopoly movement has emerged, partly inspired by the Progressives, with new ideas for the old desire to make all citizens capable of participating in our political and economic life. Its most famous advocate is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who often echoes Brandeis, and who told the story of Frances Perkins one night in a c

On Palm Sunday 1937, while Albizu languished in prison, the Liberation Army marched in the streets of Ponce. The marchers carried no weapons, but their opponents did: Ponce’s small police force swelled to five times its usual size as more than a hundred officers arrived carrying rifles, gas bombs, revolvers, clubs, and Thompson submachine guns (“to

no one gay leader of the past has been widely chronicled as having had the most foresight, the most spirited plans, and the most critical triumphs, without which contemporary LGBT people couldn’t have won their own decisive civil rights victories. But if any one person deserves such credit, it is Frank Kameny.

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. —Toni Cade Bambara

We are not simply “missing out” on knowledge; we are being robbed of it. To succeed in our movements, we must resist this theft and reclaim what has been stolen from us.

Marx’s life had been filled with such abundance that he was one of those people who found it natural to care for those around him.

People can be free in their external lives only to the extent that they have already been freed in their inner lives. Herzen, ‘Letters to an Old Comrade’

Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.