Quotes For The Day


I found these two wonderful quotes while catching up on my personal reading. The first is from John McWhorter on the subject of Coca-Cola:

"I understand that I am referring to a drink that has become an emblem of American imperialism. But I also submit that a great many who reflexively scorn Coke because of its corporate associations, if they first encountered it in a distant village in New Guinea as a warm, local brew made in earthenware pots and called something like aktiip'a, would cherish it as a masterful coca-flavored "indigenous creation" and eagerly seek to reproduce it for dinner party guests when they got home."

The second concerns the subject of elitism from Christopher Hitchens:

"I've increasingly become convinced that in order to be any kind of a public-intellectual commentator or combatant, one has to be unafraid of the charges of elitism. One has to have, actually, more and more contempt for public opinion and for the way in which it's constructed and aggregated, and polled and played back and manufactured and manipulated. If only because all these processes are actually undertaken by the elite and leave us all, finally, voting in the passive voice and believing that we're using our own opinions or concepts when in fact they have been imposed upon us."