If you don’t have the right things, you improvise, and the wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they’re what you have.
~ Herta Müller
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Tag Archives: 03m0059
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A lot of people think packing a suitcase is something you learn through practice, like singing or praying.
~ Herta Müller
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How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you’re hungry. If you can’t think of anything else.
~ Herta Müller
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You can’t rearrange freshly fallen snow, you can’t fix snow so it looks untouched. You can rework earth, and sand and even grass if you try hard enough. Water takes care of itself, because it swallows everything and flows back together once it’s done swallowing. And air is always in place because you can’t see it. Everything but snow would have kept quiet.
~ Herta Müller
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You do not need to withhold any single criticism of Woodrow Wilson, the man and the president, to regret the harm done by the unbalanced and totalizing censure that has been heaped upon him over the past decade. Wilson was a great domestic reformer. He was the first American president to perceive and explain how American power could anchor the peace of a future democratic world.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Woodrow Wilson was the first world leader to perceive security as a benefit that could be shared by like-minded nations. Until then, each great power had clambered over others to field bigger armies, float bigger navies, and accumulate more colonies. This competition had culminated in the disastrous outbreak of the Great War. Wilson glimpsed the possibility of a different way: that shared values might provide a more stable basis for peace among advanced nations than the quest for military dominance.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves. We expect them to have organized their mental categories the way we organize ours—and we are greatly disappointed when we discover that they did not.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Today, we tend to think of economic and racial egalitarianism as closely yoked causes. One hundred years ago, this was far from the case. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of those Americans most skeptical of corporate power were also the most hostile to racial equality, while those Americans who most adamantly rejected economic reform hoped to mobilize racial minorities as allies.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse.
~ Herta Müller
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