There was Wilson's overweening spiritual arrogance, which Nicolson saw as part of the president's Presbyterian inheritance. There was Wilson's thin-skinned response to the slightest criticism or opposition, but above all, there was, as Wilson himself admitted, the American president's "one-track mind."

Wilson. He was convinced he was "speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear." So, having spoken for mankind, Wilson left the podium.

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Joffre himself had done nothing to change his strategy, which was attack, attack, attack, regardless of the losses or, incredibly, without any substantive sign of success. Instead, Joffre had watched impassively as the French casualties mounted.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality. Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that's the visible world around us. In Socrates's and Plato's terms, it's the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world of Being, which is divine, "the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless," just as Socrates told visitors in his prison cell.10 Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people — indeed, for all but a very few people — that bridge has been washed out.

Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests," he continued. "Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy

Like many high-minded people, Wilson, when faced with opposition that he considered evil but which refused to yield to his arguments, felt no compunction about simply crossing his arms and refusing to play the game.

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It became a commonplace to say, as we do today, that a market economy depends on people pursuing their own self-interest. But self-interest to a student of civil society such as Adam Smith did not mean avarice or greed. Those were the typical antisocial attitudes of a more primitive state of economy and society, in which the fear of material scarcity is genuine and real. Instead, self-interest in a civilized or “polite” society involves the rational desire to provide goods and services at a profit to an equally self-interested consumer

Villagers still worship at shrines dedicated to gods and goddesses with roots in the Stone Age.12 Compared to this unequaled staying power, the British Raj seemed very transitory — like every other ruler or conqueror in Indian history. Gandhi made his own view plain in 1909, in his Hind Swaraj. "History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul," he wrote, "a record of the interruption of the course of nature."

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When the ruler or rulers failed to act in the people's interest, Buchanan wrote, then each and every citizen, even "the lowest and meanest of men," had the sacred right and duty to resist that tyrant, even to the point of killing him.

We have trodden underfoot the principles of Democracy for the sake of the loftier principles of Social Revolution," Trotsky said. "We are against oppression, but we will not yield our power without a ruthless struggle.

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