8 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2019
    1. “The meaning of the dream is this. The Father of the gods has given you kingship, such is your destiny; everlasting life is not your destiny.

      sample annotation

  2. Mar 2016
    1. The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

      Here's that story about want leading to communism.

    2. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

      Here is the line laid down by Truman: we will support "free peoples" (were the Greeks 'free' under a monarchy?) who are resisting "subjugation" by armed minorities or outside pressure.

    3. At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

      Here is the stark choice -- the origins of the cold war. Again, how accurate?

  3. Jan 2016
    1. “The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. “The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What everything is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.” [Wealth of Nations, Chapter 5]

      That's Adam Smith, giving us the labor theory of value much earlier than Marx.

    2. The labour theory of value is the proposition that the value of a commodity is equal the quantity of socially necessary labour-time required for its production.

      The 1892 Omaha Platform was, I think, drawing on the labor theory of value.

    1. societies which continue their commitment to, compulsory, universal schooling insists on a frustrating and ever more insidious enterprise of multiplying dropouts and cripples

      Pulling no punches...

    1. unlawfully assembling themselves together

      in other words, if you are black or mixed-race you have to have permission to gather in a group. Did they have permission to gather in churches? Might this be one way they "legally" gathered and help explain the prominence of black churches in the Civil Rights Movement many years later?