The Excavator: Extended Interview

January 20, 2012

Extended Interview - Trita Parsi

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

"The human word is neither immortal nor invulnerable; but it is the power that orders our chaos, and the light by which we live." - Northrop Frye: Northrop Frye's Writings on Education; pg. 85.

"Take away fear, and the battle of Freedom is half won." - William Ralph Inge: The End of an Age; pg. 150.

"At long last, however, I feel that I have come to some understanding of why man is the most fortunate of living things and, consequently, deserving of all admiration; of what may be the condition in the hierarchy of beings assigned to him, which draws upon him the envy, not of the brutes alone, but of the astral beings and of the very intelligences which dwell beyond the confines of the world. A thing surpassing belief and smiting the soul with wonder. Still, how could it be otherwise? For it is on this ground that man is, with complete justice, considered and called a great miracle and a being worthy of all admiration." - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man.

"And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time?" - Thomas Carlyle: Past and Present; pg. 198.

"No limit, no definition, may restrict the range or depth of the human spirit's passage into its own secrets or the world's." - Goethe: Scientific Studies; pg. 37.

"Common sense is neither priestcraft nor state policy." - William Hazlitt: The Fight and Other Writings; pg. 531.

"The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears." - Hunter S. Thompson: Kingdom of Fear; pg. 220.

"Anyone who shirks the labors, sacrifices, and dangers that his people must undergo is a coward. But no less a coward and traitor is the man who betrays the principles of thought to material interests, who, for example, is willing to let the holders of power decide how much is two times two. To sacrifice intellectual integrity, love of truth, the laws and methods of thought to any other interest, even that of the fatherland, is treason. When in the battle of interests and slogans the truth, like the individual, is in danger of being devalued, disfigured, and trampled under foot, our one duty is to resist and to save the truth--or rather, the striving for truth--for that is our highest article of faith." - Hermann Hesse: Reflections; pg. 5.

"For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,--even though it be covertly, and by snatches." - Herman Melville: Hawthorne and His Mosses.

"We are living in a demented world. . . Everywhere there are doubts as to the solidity of our social structure, vague fears of the imminent future, a feeling that our civilization is on the way to ruin. They are not merely the shapeless anxieties which beset us in the small hours of the night when the flame of life burns low. They are considered expectations founded on observation and judgment of an overwhelming multitude of facts. How to avoid the recognition that almost all things which once seemed sacred and immutable have now become unsettled, truth and humanity, justice and reason? We see forms of government no longer capable of functioning, production systems on the verge of collapse, social forces gone wild with power. The roaring engine of this tremendous time seems to be heading for a breakdown. But immediately the antithesis forces itself on our minds. Never has there been a time when men were so clearly conscious of their commanding duty to co-operate in the task of preserving and improving the world's well being and human civilization." - Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, In The Shadow of Tomorrow; pg. 15-16.

"Power is going to defend you against the enemy. If you don't believe in the enemy then you don't believe in the power." - Arthur Miller.

"There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts." - Jacob Bronowski.

"Most creatures take the world outside as they find it and instinctively become partners with the environment. Man is the one creature who can alter himself and his surroundings, as the geologist John Hodgdon Bradley has wisely observed, yet he is perhaps the most seriously maladjusted of all living creatures.

He is the one creature who is able to accumulate verifiable knowledge about himself and his environment, and yet he is the one who is habitually deluded. No other animal produces verbal monsters in his head and projects them on the world outside his head. Language is apparently a sword which cuts both ways. With its help man can conquer the unknown; with it he can grievously wound himself." - Stuart Chase: The Tyranny of Words; pg. 13-14.

"A lie may achieve victory when truth is afraid of its own strength." - Albert Camus: Camus at Combat; pg. 38.

"Anyone who has the slightest understanding of how cultures work knows that defining a culture, saying what it is for members of the culture, is always a major, and even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. There are canonical authorities to be selected and regularly revised, debated, re-selected, or dismissed. There are ideas of good and evil, belonging or not belonging (the same and the different), hierarchies of value to be specified, discussed, re-discussed, and settled or not, as the case may be. Moreover, each culture defines its enemies, what stands beyond it and threatens it. For the Greeks beginning with Herodotus, anyone who did not speak Greek was automatically a barbarian, an Other to be despised and fought against. An excellent recent book by the French classicist Francois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, shows how deliberately and painstakingly Herodotus sets about constructing an image of a barbarian Other in the case of the Scythians, more even than in the case of the Persians.” - Edward Said: The Clash of Definitions.

"The powers that be not only try to control events, but they try to control our memory and understanding of these events, which is part of controlling the events themselves." - Michael Parenti.

"We live now in an era where normal values have been displaced. The good is called bad, the bad - good." - Anna Politkovskaya.

"The struggle of freedom against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera.

"All the power and policy of man cannot continue a system long after its truth has ceased to be acknowledged, or an establishment long after it has ceased to contribute to utility. It is equally vain, as to expect to preserve a tree, whose roots are cut away. It may look as green and flourishing as before for a short time, but its sentence is passed, its principle of life is gone, and death is already within it." - Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry & Prose; pg. 275-276.

"The sons of Adam are limbs of each other,
Having been created of one essence.
When the calamity of time affects one limb
The other limbs cannot remain at rest.
If thou hast no sympathy for the troubles of others
Thou art unworthy to be called by the name of a human." - Saadi.

The Excavator

January 20, 2012

Extended Interview - Trita Parsi

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

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