We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. . . . I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was.
By Henry David ThoreauDecember 1983The only way I can make any sense of recent presidential elections is that the most vivid person wins, regardless of content, because too many of us have been dressing our lives in beiges and are suckers for a red tie and shiny shoes that look like relative strength.
By Anne HerbertApril 1983Muckraking, infamous mergers, the Jeffersonian ideal
By Our ReadersSeptember 1980Anchors raised, we were a free people journeying into our own living flesh, and consciousness striving to know itself: political freedom; economic freedom; sexual freedom; artistic freedom. The freedom to abuse freedom. To enslave, and to set free. To become President, and to bear arms: to lean a rifle on a window sill, take aim, squeeze the trigger, and hurl a tiny speck of our own dark heart into the tissue of another. All for the sake of freedom — the greatest burden, the greatest joy.
By Sy SafranskyDecember 1978Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today