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Quote by Steven Hyden

“But the most lasting rivalry between American landmasses is the one between the northern United States (really the northeastern United States) and the southern United States (really Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, all of Louisiana except New Orleans, and the whitest, most strip-mally regions of Florida). Although the north and south fought a war 150 years ago in order to determine which region's values were going to wind up guiding this nation forward, north vs. south has subsequently played out largely in our elections and pop culture.”

Quote by Steven Hyden

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Steven Hyden

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“When the people don't give a damn about reason, they can be manipulated quite easily - and in such cases the perception of the people are manufactured by those controlling the narratives. As a result, ask an Azerbaijani, "who do you think is at fault for the conflict at Nagorno-Karabakh" and they'll say, "Armenia of course" - or ask an Indian, "who do you think is at fault for the conflict at Jammu-Kashmir", they'll say, "Pakistan of course". Hard as it may sound, whoever controls the narrative, controls the people. And the only way to break that spell is to practice reason, but without losing your warmth.”

“When faced by an international conflict, forget diplomacy, forget statecraft, forget strategies and policies and ask yourself, what would a human do in this situation, not a politician, not a bureaucrat, not a law enforcement official, but a human? The tree of diplomacy only grows thorns of war, not fruits of peace.”

“We don’t need to build a world with one superpower, We gotta build a world where the world is superpower. We don’t need a world rotting in diplomatic gutter, Let’s build a world that has no geopolitical clutter.”

“...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes. [Letters to John Taylor, 1814, XVIII, p. 484]”

“We are repelled by the Teutons, because their thoughts will not minister to our private needs; but this instinctive recoil at the same time explains a furtive attraction which was not exhausted by the romantic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concentration of the Teutons exposes a narrowness of another kind in ourselves; every time we are confronted with a people of another type, a stone in the foundation of our complacency is loosened. We are surprised by an uneasy feeling that our civilization does not exhaust the possibilities of life; we are led to suspect that our problems derive their poignancy from the fact that, at times, we mistake our own reasonings about reality for reality itself. We become dimly aware that the world stretches beyond our horizon, and as this apprehension takes shape, there grows upon us a suspicion that some of the problems which baffle us are problems of our own contrivance; our questionings often lead us into barren fastnesses instead of releasing us into the length and breadth of eternity, and the reason may be that we are trying to make a whole of fragments and not, as we thought, attempting to grasp what is a living whole in itself. And at last, when we learn to gaze at the world from a new point of view, revealing prospects which have been concealed from our eyes, we may perhaps find that Hellas also contains more things, riches as well as mysteries than are dreamt of in our philosophy; after all, we have perhaps been no less romantic in our understanding of Greece than in our misunderstanding of the Teutons and other primitive peoples.”

“In this ideal of justice the apparent conflict between the theories of law and the practice of everyday life is accounted for. The Teutons had a strong inclination for peaceable settlement of disputes, but mediation stood outside trying to effect a reconciliation by mutual agreement without in the least prejudicing the right of frith. Later law reflects an original Teutonic sense of justice insofar as it works up two separate tendencies into one system. The lawyers of the transition age tried to make mediation an integral part of the judicial proceedings and thus tend towards a legal system built up on the weighing and valuation of the offence at the same time as they worked for the abolishing of the ancient right of private revenge. By this harmonising process, Teutonic jurisprudence was gradually led into correspondence with Roman law, but it was slow in abandoning the idea of absolute reparation as the paramount condition of right and justice.”