Davin Winger

• Mexico is not only a country of emigrants, but also a country of immigrants who come to build their lives anew

• The justice which in itself is natural and universal is otherwise and more nobly ordered than that other justice which is special, national, and constrained to the ends of government:—
• And whereas one told the Mamertini that statutes were of no efficacy against armed men; and another told the tribune of the people that the time of justice and of war were distinct things; and a third said that the noise of arms deafened the voice of laws, this man was not precluded from listening to the laws of civility and pure courtesy.

• But their schemes were discovered, and Cicero brought the matter before the senate for deliberation.24 The first speaker, Silanus, expressed the opinion that the men ought to suffer the extremest fate, and those who followed him in    p289turn were of the same mind, until it came to Caesar.
• Caesar now rose, and since he was a powerful speaker and wished to increase every change and commotion in the state as so much stuff for his own designs, rather than to allow them to be quenched, he urged many persuasive and humane arguments. He would not hear of the men being put to death without a trial, but favoured their being kept in close custody, 5 and he wrought such a change in the opinions of the senate, which was in fear of the people, that even Silanus recanted and said that he too had not meant death, but imprisonment; for to a Roman this was the "extremest" of all evils.
• Cato rose to give his opinion, and launched at once into a passionate and angry speech, abusing Silanus for his change of opinion, and assailing Caesar. Caesar, he said, under a popular pretext and with humane words, was trying to subvert the state;
• Cato carried the day and changed the opinions of the senators, so that they condemned the men to death.
• For no virtue, by the fame and credit which it gives, creates more envy than justice, because both power and credit follow it chiefly among the common folk. 8 These do not merely honour the just, as they do the brave, but they actually love the just, and put confidence and trust in them. As for the brave and wise, however, they fear the one and distrust the other; and besides, they think that these excel by a natural gift rather than by their own volition, considering bravery to be a certain intensity, and wisdom a certain vigour, of soul, whereas any one who wishes can be just forthwith, and the greatest disgrace is visited upon injustice, as being inexcusable baseness.
• "Now I am my own master."

4 more annotations...

• For the life that is unconscious is most sweet- 
  Until we learn what joy and sorrow are. 
• Before this woman, whom I am loath to leave 
  Midst foes a widow with this orphaned child. 
  But I will seek the meadows by the shore: 
  There will I wash and purge these stains, if so 
  I may appease Athena's heavy wrath. 
• For on this day alone, such were his words, 
  Would the wrath of divine Athena vex him. 

1 more annotation...

• All goods that are produced not by common, but by skilled labour, form an exception. Although in the day's product of a sculptor, a skilled joiner, a violin-maker, an engineer, and so on, no more labour be incorporated than in the day's product of a common labourer or a factory operative, the former has a greater exchange value, and often a many times greater exchange value. The adherents of the labour value theory have of course not been able to overlook this exception. Sometimes they mention it, but in such a way as to suggest that it does not form a real exception, but only a little variation that yet comes under the rule. Marx, for instance, adopts the expedient of reckoning skilled labour as a multiplex of common labour. "Complicated labour,
• A fourth exception to the Labour Principle may be found in the familiar and universally admitted phenomenon that even those goods, in which exchange value entirely corresponds with the labour costs, do not show this correspondence at every moment. By the fluctuations of supply and demand their exchange value is put sometimes above, sometimes below the level corresponding to the amount of labour incorporated in them.
• To sum up. The asserted "law" that the value of goods is regulated by the amount of the labour incorporated in them, does not hold at all in the case of a very considerable proportion of goods; in the case of the others, does not hold always, and never holds exactly. These are the facts of experience with which the value theorists have to reckon.
• On the other hand, the conclusion might very well be drawn that expenditure of labour is one circumstance which exerts a powerful influence on the value of many goods; always remembering that labour is not an ultimate cause—for an ultimate cause must be common to all the phenomena of value—but a particular and intermediate cause.
• Shut up in his labour theory Marx, too, fails to grasp the idea that Time also has an influence on value.

3 more annotations...

• Is virgin soil a product of labour? Or a gold mine? Or a natural seam of coal? And yet, as every one knows, these often have a very high exchange value. But how can an element that does not enter at all into one class of goods possessing exchange value be put forward as the common universal principle of exchange value? How Marx would have lashed any of his opponents who had been guilty of such logic!