Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes
A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Ortega y Gasset, José. The Theme of Our Time. Translated by James Cleugh, W.W. Norton & Company, 1933, p. 25.
Germany, after its defeat in WWI was going through massive demonstrations and strikes. The government kept issuing bulletins that “Order Prevails” and the like. Luxemburg’s rhetoric and writing was so damaging to the government that they had her assassinated shortly after this statement.
Vladimir Lenin
Walters who had been a brilliant military intelligence officer—and is in the Intelligence Hall of Fame—saw the fall of the Berlin Wall coming and had made some preparations. However, no one else in the government paid any attention to his prediction because the CIA and the NSA as well as the DOD Service Military Intelligence units all had nothing suggesting such a possibility in all their reports. They were all relying on spies. But the East Germans and the Russians had no idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a possibility, and their assessments said that it was not possible. Our spies reported that and out intelligence agencies assumed that they knew what they were talking about. Walters, however, based his judgment on reading very thoroughly all the publicly available information, and visited the American Zone of Berlin and inspected the Wall, its culture, the reports from the East Germans who had managed to escape, and it was very clear to him.
The conference to which he referred was the 1884 Berlin Conference where the European powers carved up Africa into colonial empires. He continued to attribute the difficulties of the African nations to the vestiges of colonialism over a century later. In addition to the effect of colonialism, however, it was he who after being elected popularly, established a one party autocracy, where there was never a chance thereafter to vote for anyone else. It was he who introduced Communist style socialism which ruined the Zambian economy. And it was he who tolerated the corruption that, after independence, spread throughout the country and plagues so much of Africa.
Vladimir Lenin
Immediately after the Russian Revolution, the provisional government appointed him as Ambassador to the United States. However, the provisional government was supplanted when the Bolsheviks took over. Not enamored of Communism, he stayed in the United States with many other Russian refugees.
José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism, and dictatorship. His philosophy has been characterized as a "philosophy of life" that "comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism (prior to Martin Heidegger's) and his realist historicism, which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce."
