How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.
In the end we are all sacked and it's always awful. It is as inevitable as death following life. If you are elevated there comes a day when you are demoted. Even Prime Ministers.
I was an arden Hayes man, but that was natural, for I was pretty young at the time, I have since convinced myself that the political opinioins of a nation are of next to no value, in any case, but that what little rag of value they posess is to be found among the old, rather than among the young.
Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers, I don't think there's anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.
An oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society because under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information.
The autobiographer looks at life through the lens of his or her own life and really uses herself or himself as the jumping-off place to examine the social mores and the economic and political climates. In a way, the autobiography becomes history as well as the story of one person, for it becomes the story of a family or the story of the state or nation.
I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.
The time is fast coming when politicians will cease to fear the religion of humanity and humanitarians will find entrance into political life indispensable for full service.