Saturday, September 02, 2006

What you don't want

Why democracies are always, somehow, weak.

Chandrahas Choudhury quoting Javier Marias.

People who know what they want "will always have the edge over those who don't know what they want or only know what they don't want. Those of us in the latter group are defenceless, we are afflicted with an extraordinary weakness of which we are not always aware and so we can easily be destroyed by a stronger force that has chosen us, and from which we only temporarily escape…"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all
those others that have been tried.

NoolaBeulah said...

Entirely agree. The stimulus for my somewhat disheartened post was the response of people in Europe to Hezbollah and the situation in Southern Lebanon. But I have long wondered how we will manage to gear ourselves up to the challenge of the messianic hordes without and within when so much of our system is built on the avoidance of extremes and the softening of the hard edges of life.