When the politicians become historians, that becomes propaganda and not history

 --- Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowduhury, a former lawmaker from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, quoted in Students toppled a dictator. Now they must help remake Bangladesh, CS Monitor, May 2025

Excerpt

“When the politicians become historians, that becomes propaganda and not history,” says Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowduhury, a former lawmaker from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. “That is what Sheikh Hasina started to do. And all her deeds and misdeeds, the symbol used was her father. So when she came down, the symbol came down with it.”

Speak to one person like it's the last time

 --- @thestoicmanual, post on X, quoted by Anneliese Burgess, "'n Week van wolke, ...," Binne+Land, 28 Jun 2025

A beautiful life isn't complicated. It's intentional. Spend on quality items. On people who matter to you. Be alone often. Text slower. Eat slower. Think slower. Notice the wind. The trees. The flowers. Fold your clothes with care. Speak to one person like it's the last time. That's wealth. That's presence. That's enough.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

 --- Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) American politician and author, Godkin Lecture, Harvard (1985) (Source via Wist)

Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life.

 --- English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-90), quoted by Joseph Epstein in The Unbearable Ubiquity of Trump, WSJ, 5 Sep 2025

From Epstein's piece

Unless you have actual skin in the game, politics is a spectator sport that can soon grow dreary and wearying. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) felt that “politics is an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” He also believed that “politics are an inferior form of human activity,” and that politics “were nothing more than a struggle for power.” In his “Notebooks: 1922-86,” Oakeshott wrote: “A general interest and preoccupation with politics is the surest sign of a general decay in a society.” We in the U.S. have over the past decade been living with this political preoccupation.

What offended Oakeshott about politics was its rivaling claimants’ promises of perfection, the arguments coming down to dueling virtues, “with one side intent on crushing the other.” Politics provides promises about the future. Oakeshott preferred life in the present. For him the role of government should be “to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.” He added: “Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life.” Our two political parties, of course, hold with none of this, each asserting that it and it alone knows the road to perfection, holds the key to the good life.