Justin Lancy

uttering taboo truths can have a liberating effect even if many people privately already know them to be true: The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know

We live in disturbed times. There are more people displaced than at any time since the Second World War. Most of these 65 million uprooted people remain within their own countries, but nearly a third – over 20 million – had no alternative but to cross a border. When they did, they became refugees.

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

but if you’re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five: America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told

There are more possible futures than the one that actually happens.

if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries.

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.