(3089/898) Advice and observations

1733) Beware of things that are left in form but right in essence.

Mao Zedong
"On Contradiction" (1937)
posted by "netpolizei" on the Court TV
OJ Simpson discussion board (3/13/1996)

1734) The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

Mark Twain
letter to Edward Dimmit (7/19/1901) [TQ]

1735) There are so many factions in the USA today, worrying and arguing over absolute drivel to the point that they are building fences to keep out the ants while the elephants stamp their ass into the pavement.

Brett Sloan (attributed)
posted by "balance7" on the Court TV
OJ Simpson discussion board (3/13/1996)

1736) In his treatment of contemporary black-white relations in the United States, [author Ronald] Segal devotes some critical attention to the current vogue of Afrocentrism. His charge that its advocates tend to substitute an idealized and mythological African past for the realities of the African American historical experience is justified. But as an historian he should have been more curious about why black nationalism or separatism of one kind or another reemerges in the United States whenever the American dream of equality for all begins to appear unrealizable to many African Americans (as seems to be the case right now). His own account of the persistence of racism in the United States might have given him a deeper understanding of what provoked many blacks in the 1920s or today to give up on the hope of being incorporated into a common color-blind society and to embrace a purely African identity as an alternative.

George M. Fredrickson
"Home Away from Home" in
The New Republic (3/11/1996)
[review of The Black Diaspora
by Ronald Segal]