Lifestyle Critique

“Robbers of the world, they have exhausted the land and now scour the sea. If their victims are rich, they despoil them; if they are poor, they subjugate them; and neither East nor West can satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal greed both poverty and riches. To robbery, murder, and pillage they give the false name of empire, and when they make a desolation, they call it peace.”

–Part of a speech attributed to the Caledonian chieftain Galgacus in Tacitus’s history “Agricola,” vol. 32, p. 29. Quoted in Gray Brechin’s “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.”