... From A Journalist

   "In America there isn't any mainstream independent press.  If you tell the truth it will never appear in print.  The business of mainstream journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell their country and race for their daily bread.  We are intellectual prostitutes."  - John Swinton, A Senior Journalist For 'The New York Times' - 1953

The Misery

   "The Spring of the year was unusually cold; and the blasts of the northeast wind shook the large oriel window of his room, and made him shiver with cold as he crouched over the fire. A universal doubt shook every prop and pillar on which his moral Being had hitherto reposed. Something was continually whispering: 'What if all thy Religion, all thy aspiring hope, all thy trust in God, be a mere delusion? The more thou searchest into the mystery of thy Being, findest thou not that iron, relentless laws govern thee, and every impulse and thought of thee, no less than the dull stones beneath thy feet? What art thou more than a material arrangement, the elements of which might at any moment, by an accident, be dispersed, and thou, without any to care for or pity thee throughout the wide universe, sink into the universal night? Prate not any more of thy God and thy Providence; thou art here alone, placed at the mercy of impersonal and unbending laws, which, whether they preserve or crush thee, the universe with supremist indifference will roll onward on its way.'

   The misery of the incessant recurrence of such thoughts to a believing mind, he only who has experienced them can understand. They took away the charm from the human face, the glory from the sky, the beauty from the flowers: all these seemed to be the garlands round the victim's neck, designed to cheat it for a time into a little ease and forgetfulness of the cold, inexorable necessity that lay beneath."            - Thomas Arnold

Mrs. Randolph Churchill

   "Daughter of the millionaire New York sportsman Leonard Jerome, she was born with the proverbial silver spoon and in her teens was taken to Paris for the 'finishing' every wealthy girl was supposed to receive before being presented to Society. There she became a talented pianist and an accomplished linguist.

    Wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough whom she married at 20, she was an instant success in the top circles of London society, being singled out for particular attention by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, who remained her devoted admirer for the rest of his life. Her brilliant career was paralleled by that of her husband whose spectacular rise to Parliament was snuffed out too soon by an illness.

   Mother of Winston Churchill, she received from him first the complete devotion of a little boy and then the open-hearted confidence of an ambitious young man whose career she did everything within her power to further. She firmly believed he would become Prime Minister although she did not live to see it.

    Mrs. Churchill grew older, of course, but never 'old' keeping her beauty, charm and drive to the end. Her star was not dimmed by two subsequent marriages, one of which ended in divorce, and her relationship with her son never faltered."  - Anita Leslie 

Destructive Violence

"The availability of guns has a curious and macabre relation to violence. This form of technology not only vastly increases the range and the effectiveness of violence but also has an effect - generally dulling - on the consciousness of those who use them. My having in my hand a pistol with which to shoot some living thing changed me into an entirely different person psychologically. I could deal out death to anyone since I was possessed by this instrument of death; I had become an irrational man of hostility. The gun had me rather than my having it. I had become its instrument. Seized with a dislike for the person I had become, I took the gun back into the house and put it away. We understand only vaguely the effect that technology can have on the consciousness of a person, but it is clear that the possession of guns can radically change personality. Glenn Gray remarked that, as an officer in the army, he did not feel dressed when he went out without his pistol strapped to his belt.

An extreme form of such an effect on personality can be seen in the career of Charles Fairweather, the teen-ager who went on a rampage in Nebraska and murdered eleven people before he was caught. 'I love guns,' he had said as a boy. 'They give me a feeling of power like nothing else.' It is obvious that the person on a binge of violence must become unfeeling and detached, like a soldier mowing down the enemy with a machine gun, or else he could never do what he feels he has to do. The symbol of the gun as a phallus and its relation to sex is well known. Both are long and slim, both eject a substance that can radically change the person into whom it is directed. Hence the gun has become, especially with simple people, a symbol par excellence of masculine power. Stanley Kunitz remarks, 'we hunted with guns to eat, we hunted with guns to make the land safe for our homes, and we hunted with guns to live in the pioneer period. In all these ways the gun was valuable, a laudable symbol of power, and handling it well was also laudable.' Many a person feels that when he possesses a gun that he now has a power that had been unfairly taken away from him. And what a power it is! He can now make this big explosion and hurl that projectile to kill things much larger than himself. …  The consciousness is surrendered willingly." - Rollo May

On Fascism, Nazism And Stalinism

   "Side by side with the development of the positive aspects of the matriarchal complex we find, in the European development, the persistence of, or even further, regression to its negative aspects -- the fixation to blood and soil.  Man -- freed from the traditional bonds of the medieval community, afraid of the new freedom which transformed him into an isolated atom -- escaped into a new idolatry of blood and soil, of which nationalism and racism are the two most evident expressions.  Along with the progressive development, which is a blending of the positive aspect of both patriarchal and matriarchal spirit, went the development of the negative aspects of both principles: the worship of the state, blended with the idolatry of the race or nation.  Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, are the most dramatic manifestations of this blend of state and clan worship, both principles embodied in the figure of a 'Fuehrer.' These totalitarianisms are by no means the only manifestations of an incestuous fixation in our time. … Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult."  -  Erich Fromm