Quotes from Susan Neiman

If the right to happiness is not an idle piece of wishful thinking but a demand of reason, the consequences can be revolutionary.

Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.

It's a matter of logical structure: what is, just is, and any claim about what ought to be is a claim about our own wishes and desires. Why ever should we imagine that the two would be related?

And we have seen how Rousseau's insistence on creating a world that makes sense ultimately vitiates his attempt to educate a child for a world that does not.

His mother claims she didn't know anything about the racist terror going on in Mississippi and Alabama; she was caught up in joining a sorority, not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world. Or around the corner.

Golden ages have no shade of grey.

Just how much life is left in Confederate ghosts became clear to the world, at the latest, with the election of Donald J. Trump.

The claim that there is no alternative but perdition to a worldview that shows how everything fits together and makes perfect sense is a mark of fundamentalism, whether of religious or market variety. In a child, such moments are appealing, necessary and usually harmless.

She was ten years old. "That's about the age when people start deforming their consciences in order to accept something that's not just manifestly wrong but manifestly contrary to the religious beliefs that are front and center in their lives." Like Bettina Stangneth or Jan Philipp Reemtsma or David Person, Diane McWhorter cannot say why her conscience resisted attempts to deform it.

Everything short of an explanation of the world as a whole is frustratingly partial. An explanation of the world must include an answer to why the world as a whole is just that way. And the only truly satisfying answer would be: because it's the best of all possible ones.

The desire for regional innocence is so powerful that every single Klan witness at the Birmingham bombing trial in 2001 said under oath that he never had any bad feelings about black people.

DeWaal and others have shown that primates have the capacity most basic to moral development: the ability to put yourself in others' shoes. The feeling of sympathy, the capacity for gratitude, the sense of justice all start right there.

The philosopher Janna Thompson has argued that obligations to right historical wrongs persist indefinitely, if not eternally. She believes that keeping transgenerational commitments, implicit or not, is the central moral and political good that gives nations the basis for trust.

The rise of the Tea Party following Obama's first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America's psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who'd never fully faced American darkness.

How many knots can the psyche tie itself into to defend itself against moral truth?

During a 2015 meeting with representatives of those countries, a European Union official dismissed their claims with the words, "We cannot correct history. What happened, happened." One wishes he'd read Améry: "What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals.

It's still not clear that the South lost the war," said Diane. "It's driving the national agenda, after all. You can see it with Trump; that's the same population who elected George Wallace.

If Obama was the American dream—"Nowhere else on earth would my story be possible"—Trump is the American nightmare.

rise of the Tea Party following Obama's first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America's psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who'd never fully faced American darkness.

I think Southern whites are very literal-minded about the Bible, and the Constitution as well, because they are always searching for ways to read texts that would support their racial views. It goes beyond race to support a hierarchical worldview in which everyone has a place: slaves, children, women. A typical Sunday morning starts with a biblical text that gives legitimacy to whatever the preacher wants to say.

Mississippi is a place where the resistance to the Enlightenment is out in the open, making it anything but obsolete.

No white person I met in the South would say their distaste for Obama was a function of racism. I don't agree with his liberal policies, they'd tell me. But disagreement is not hatred, and a growing body of literature argues that racism was the deciding factor in the 2016 election.

The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected of him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. (Human Condition, p. 178) For de Beauvoir, this newness

Unless you've lived a long time in Germany, you'll be surprised to learn that descendants of the Wehrmacht made the same claims as the descendants of the Confederate Army. Not only in the dark, shell-shocked days that followed the unconditional surrender outside Berlin in 1945; such remarks continued to be made in public through the end of the twentieth century, when the Wehrmacht Exhibit broke West Germany's final taboo.