Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on ‘Insult and Hatred’ Vs. Love)

“Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. What? says Alf. Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.” —Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

All hail James Joyce today, on “Bloomsday”—the worldwide celebration of the 24 hours (June 16, 1904) that constitute the “plot” of his novel Ulysses—and, not coincidentally, the same day that he began to see Nora Barnacle, his future muse and wife.

The above somehow feels an especially appropriate quote in an age in where “insult and hatred” reign supreme. And, as the novelist writes, “That’s not life for men and women.”

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Hatred, ‘A Vice of Narrow Souls’)

“Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny.”—French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), The Muse of the Department (1843)

Quote of the Day (Wendell Willkie, on Taking Away ‘The Liberties of Those We Hate’)

“For now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love. Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads. It has been woven over many centuries by the patience and sacrifice of countless liberty-loving men and women. It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and gentile, of foreign- and native-born. For God's sake, let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed, where or when man will find its protective warmth again.”—American lawyer, industrialist, and 1940 Republican Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie (1892-1944), One World (1943)

For a summary of the life and importance of this figure who would be wildly out of step with the current GOP, see my post from a dozen years ago.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on How Envy and Fear Produce Hatred)

“The irresponsibility which power creates corrupts judgment and accentuates the natural tendency toward selfish conduct. Meanwhile the special privileges which the powerful always claim for themselves excite the envy, as their power prompts the fear, of those who deal with them. When envy and fear are compounded they produce hatred. If this hatred in the hearts of the weak is frustrated for a time by their impotence, it usually united them into a confederacy of power in the end.”—American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Perils of American Power,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1932, reprinted in The American Idea: The Best of “The Atlantic Monthly” (2007)

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘Arrogance and Hatred’)

“Arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.” —Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “A Prayer for My Daughter,” originally published in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), republished in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
 
While “arrogance and hatred” might be sold in the streets, they are manufactured elsewhere—by heads of state, religious leaders, and media moguls who should know better.

Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on Hatred)

“A man’s hatred of his own condition no more helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them.” —Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist and poet George Santayana (1863-1952), Reason in Common Sense (Vol. 1 of “The Life of Reason”) (1905)

Quote of the Day (Amos Oz, on a ‘Powerful Antidote to Fanaticism and Hatred’)

“Imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred. It is, in my view, also a major moral imperative.”—Israeli novelist, journalist, and peace advocate Amos Oz (1939-2018), speech upon accepting the 2005 Goethe Prize in recognition of his contribution to world literature, in The Amos Oz Reader, edited by Nitza Ben-Dov (2009)

The image accompanying this post of Amos Oz was taken Sept. 21, 2005, by Michiel Hendryckx.

Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on ‘The Danger with Hatred’)

“The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Philip Roth (1933-2018), The Human Stain (2000)

As it is with individuals, so it is with societies and nations.

Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on Hate and the Threat to ‘The American Idea’)

“America cannot survive if the American idea is repudiated. Nations are not made by territory, or the greatness of nations by extent of land. Nations are made by commitments of mind and loyalties of heart, and the nobler the commitment of the mind, the higher the loyalty of the heart, the greater the nation. If the American proposition is no longer the proposition to which the American heart and mind were committed at our beginning, then America is finished, and the only question left is when America will fall.”—American poet-statesman Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “Must We Hate?”, The Atlantic, February 1963

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on How the World Perishes)

“The world perishes not from robbers, not from fires, but from hatred, hostility, from all these petty squabbles.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts (1896), translated by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2018)

It’s funny how, despite numerous times reading a great work of art or seeing it performed, certain lines jump out at you as if you’re hearing them for the first time. Such was the case last night when I was watching one of my favorite plays, Uncle Vanya, in a marvelous PBS broadcast of Richard Nelson’s adaptation.

In the above quote, Yelena is upbraiding the title character for his recent peevishness, choosing to overlook a fact by now obvious to her: that Vanya’s drinking and intemperate outbursts have been triggered by the notion that this young beauty he adores is possessed by his brother-in-law, a retired academic whose pomposity he can no longer abide.

Even with all these ironies behind Yelena’s attempt to affect Vanya, though, the essential truth of her statement has become more and more apparent this past week. 

Even with fires in the Amazon increasingly the likelihood of global warming (an outcome that would alarm and dismay another Yelena admirer, Dr. Astrov), the world in recent days has become more mindful than before that public policy is inordinately affected by outbreaks both of tribal hatreds and leaders’ incomprehensible temper tantrums.

Quote of the Day (Pope Francis, on Avoiding ‘Messages of Hatred or Terror’)

“Don’t be taken in by the messages of hatred or terror all around us. Instead, make new friends. Give of your time and always show concern for those who ask your help. Be brave and go against the tide; be friends of Jesus, who is the Prince of Peace.” —Pope Francis, “Message for the Jubilee of Mercy, for Young Boys and Girls,” Jan. 6, 2016

Quote of the Day (Booker T. Washington, on Great Men and Little Men)

“I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.” —African-American educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (1901)

Quote of the Day (Graham Greene, on Pity and God’s Image)

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” —Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Swift, on Hatred and Love)

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”—Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels author – and Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin