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Quote by Wendell Steavenson

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Wendell Steavenson

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“locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: 'We just don't understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?”

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Book:The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
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“However, he still retained something of the fluid notions of male and female at the heart of the Ramakrishna's spiritual idealism: 'The true man is he who is strong as strength itself and yet possesses a woman's heart.' Central to this man-making was obedience: 'If your superiors order you to throw yourself into a river and catch a crocodile, you must first obey and then reason with him [sic].' This type of yogu put sacrifice before rationality: to give up one's life without a thought was to be the freest of all. He also emphasized an almost military loyalty to the order that squashed the temptation of sect and schism. And yet, there remained that impossible paradox: 'You must be free as the air, and as obedient as this plant and the dog.”

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Book:Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
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“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”

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Book:On Democracy
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“A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off--even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied to me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and I would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it anymore and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.”

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Book:On Democracy
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“It was a familiar pantomime--the free press, deplored yet admired. Under their vests the senators were secretly glad that they were unable to dislodge a couple of American photographers. It was what the hearing was about, really--the photographers, squatting imperturbably in front of the men who were plotting to win a war that would preserve for photographers the right to squat imperturbably.”

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Author:E.B. White
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