Sari Graham

“blinds them to anything and everything that falls outside that system. What they see and feel is only what feeds their addiction or what threatens it. To themselves they seem logical, even when they are being incoherent. To themselves they seem reasonable, even when they are being irrational. To themselves they seem moral, even when they are doing things that are destroying themselves and others. It is why many alcoholics are unkindly called “dry drunks” even after they stop drinking. The thinking patterns”
― Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality

“People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous.”
― Terry Eagleton, Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America

“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
― Timothy Snyder

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.'

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century