I’d never been a particularly spiritual person, but meditation came to me as a way to be at peace with a seemingly untenable situation. I’ve started to feel more grounded—more intertwined with the spirit of life while alone in my concrete box than I did during much of my time in the free world. Activists need to incorporate this internal work into the movement. It’s the basis of true compassion. Once you realize that there’s really no “them”—no other—moral action is not sacrifice. It’s just aligning yourself with what is good.

…discourse is a great potentate, which by the smallest and most secret body accomplishes the most divine works; for it can stop fear and assuage pain and produce joy and make mercy abound.

Nothing resembles monotheism as much as moneytheism. Because they are so closely joined, moneytheism and monotheism have had a tempestuous relationship throughout Western history. Interrupted by periods of intense conflict, alphabet cultures have usually found a way to accomodate the twin aspirations of wanting to be nearer to both Gott and Geld. The Puritan ethic encouraged guiltless devotion to both. Profits and prophets coexist. Although different in content and value, the abstract mental process by which people believe in an imageless deity is close to the one by which they place faith in the worth of abstract monetary equivalencies.

The Spanish Ministry of Education has offered Einstein a professorship at a Spanish university, he has accepted. This is the strangest joke of world history. Germany establishes limpieza de la sangre—Spain appoints the German Jew.

One is an alien species or a Jew with 25 percent Jewish blood, if one grandparent was Jewish. As in fifteenth-century Spain, but then the issue was faith. Today it’s zoology + business.

Although the law represents order and is the best institution to prevent civic chaos, it fails when based exclusively on masculine values. Then, it often becomes the instrument of tyranny.