[quotes] The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin 1962

 

"Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe that white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear."

"For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become."

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread."

"What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them."

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption - which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards - is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulations with which so many liberals address their Negro equals."

"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."

"If we - and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others - do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophesy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"

[quotes] The Selected Works of Audre Lorde - Audre Lorde, Roxane Gay (ed.) 2020

  


"For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them feel - of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead - while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths." - Poetry Is Not a Luxury

"And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, 'I can't possibly teach Black women's writing - their existence is so different from mine.' Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, 'She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?' Or, 'She's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?' Or again, 'This woman write of her sons and I have no children.' And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other." - The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action 

"If white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?" - The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

"If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed." - The Uses of Anger

"I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilizations; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you." - The Uses of Anger

"When I say I am a Black feminist, I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as result of my Blackness as well as my womanness, and therefore my struggles on both these fronts are inseparable. When I say I am a Black Lesbian, I mean I am a woman whose primary focus of loving, physical as well as emotional, is directed to women. It does not mean I hate men." - I Am Your Sister

"There was a poster in the 1960s that was very popular: HE'S NOT BLACK, HE'S MY BROTHER! It used to infuriate me because it implied that the two were mutually exclusive - he couldn't be both brother and Black. Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized. 

I am a Black Lesbian, and I am your sister." - I Am Your Sister

"We all have to die at least once. Making that death useful would be winning for me. I wasn't supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up white boys' world. I want desperately to live, and I'm ready to fight for that living even if I die shortly. Just writing those words down snaps everything I want to do into a neon clarity." - A Burst of Light

"And first off I identified as a Black Feminist Lesbian poet, although it felt unsafe, which is probably why I had to do it. I explained that I identified myself as such because if there was one other Black Feminist Lesbian poet in isolation somewhere within the reach of my voice, I wanted her to know she was not alone." - A Burst of Light

"Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone, who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy." - A Burst of Light

"The first people who interviewed me in white coats from behind a computer were only interested in my health-care benefits and proposed method of payment. Those crucial facts determined what kind of plastic ID card I would be given, and without a plastic ID card, no one at all was allowed upstairs to see any doctor, as I was told by the uniformed, pistoled guards at all the stairwells." - A Burst of Light

"I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a firm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more efficient clarity." - A Burst of Light

And my favorite poems from the collection in these selected works: 

If You Come Softly

Bloodbirth

Martha

On a night of the full moon

The American Cancer Society Or There Is More Than One Way To Skin a Coon

Love Poem

Revolution is One Form of Social Change

Power

Between Ourselves

To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman

Thaw

The Politics of Addiction

[poems] milk and honey - rupi kaur 2015

the very thought of you 

has my legs spread apart

like an easel with a canvas

begging for art

"like your mouth has the gift of reading and i'm your favorite book. find your favorite page in the soft spot between my legs and read it carefully."

"deeply hooded with conviction

the rivers of punjab

flow through my bloodstream so"

for you to see beauty here

does not mean

there is beauty in me

it means there is beauty rooted

so deep within you

you can't help but

see it everywhere

[quotes] The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley - Alex Haley and Malcolm X 1964

"This is still one of the black man's big troubles today. So many of those so-called 'upper-class' Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are 'different from those others' that they can't see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes." 109

"Always, every now and then, I had given her a hard time, just to keep her in line. Every once in a while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this, too." 138

"But people are always speculating - why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed." 153

"Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars - caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars." 155

"I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you." 167

"I suppose it was inevitable that my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk." 176

"If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity - because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about." 183

"My application had, of course, been made and during this time I received from Chicago my 'X.' The Muslim's 'X' symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my 'X' replaced the white slavemaster name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears." 203

"Yes, I will pull off that liberal's halo that he spends such efforts cultivating! The North's liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world's worst hypocrites." 276

"It was like being on a battlefield - with intellectual and philosophical bullets. It was an exciting battle with ideas. I got so I could feel my audiences' temperaments. I've talked with other public speakers; they agree that this ability is native to any person who has the 'mass appeal' gift, who can get through to and move people. It's a psychic radar. As a doctor, with his finger against a pulse, is able to feel the heart rate, when I am up there speaking, I can feel the reaction to what I am saying." 288

"Whenever any group can vote in a bloc, and decide the outcome of elections, and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick. Immigrants once made Tammany Hall the most powerful single force in American politics. In 1880, New York City's first Irish Catholic Mayor was elected an by 1960 America had its first Irish Catholic President. America's black man, voting as a bloc, could wield an even more powerful force." 321

"The co-pilot was darker than he was. I can't tell you the feeling it gave me. I had never seen a black man flying a jet. That instrument panel: no one ever could know what all of those dials meant! Both of the pilots were smiling at me, treating me with the same honor and respect I had received ever since I left America." 331

"I saw clearly the obvious European influence upon the Lebanese culture. It showed me how any country's moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women - especially its young women. Wherever the spiritual values have been submerged, if not destroyed, by an emphasis upon the materials things, invariably, the women reflect it [...] Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced." 355

"Speaking in the Ibadan University's Trenchard Hall, I urged that Africa's independent nations needed to see the necessity of helping to bring the Afro-American's case before the United Nations. I said that just as the American Jew is in political, economic, and cultural harmony with world Jewry, I was convinced that it was time for all Afro-Americans to join the world's Pan-Africanists." 357

"My hotel's dining room, when I went to breakfast, was full of more of those whites - discussing Africa's untapped wealth as though the African waiters had no ears. It nearly ruined my meal, thinking how in America they sicked police dogs on black people, and threw bombs in black churches, while blocking the doors to their white churches - and now, once again in the land where their forefathers had stolen blacks and thrown them into slavery, was that white man." 359

"'All of Africa unites in opposition to South Africa's apartheid, and to the oppression in the Portuguese territories. But you waste your time if you don't realize that Verwoerd and Salazar, and Britain and France, never could last a day if it were not for United States support. So until you expose the man in Washington, D.C., you haven't accomplished anything.'" 361

"'I've had enough of someone else's propaganda,' I had written to these friends. 'I'm for the truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.'" 373

"The first thing I tell them is that at least where my own particular Black Nationalist organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, is concerned, they can't join us. I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are 'proving' that they are 'with us.' But the hard truth is this isn't helping to solve America's racist problem. The Negroes aren't the racists. Where the really sincere white people have got to do their 'proving' of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America's racism really is - and that's in their own home communities; America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work." 383

"And if I die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America - then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine." 389

[quotes] Radical Dharma - Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah 2016

"One abiding theory that emerges from the practice of a radical dharma that presents itself is that you should know this, attend to that, be aware of these things, but you must do them for your liberation, not mine." xvii

"Will we express the promise of and commitment to liberation for all beings, or will we instead continue a hyper-individualized salvation model - the myth of meritocracy - that is the foundation of this country's untruth?" xxv

"In the sentiment of my home community, I may not be where I'm going, but I am grateful that I'm not where I used to be." 5

"To hold queerness as a practice is to be in active radical acceptance of everyone and all things as they are." 42

"I experience a lot of anger, but I'm not involved in activism because I'm pissed off. I'm involved because I want people to be happy. At the same time I admit that I experience anger all the time. And yet, I'm also motivated by trying to love in a way that's authentic and open. I'm struggling to see the nature of anger and to transform that anger into something that's about creating, not destroying." 49

"We have to commit to our own liberation regardless of what happens outside. And paradoxically, that gives way to change happening outside." 53

"There would have been significant woundedness if my mother said that she could not accept me or love me because of my sexuality. I was very fortunate to receive love from a mother who, in that one instant, chose not to commit violence by restricting her love but chose to love more intensely, thereby becoming an agent of my further healing." 67

"Tonglen allows me to enter into a kind of intimacy with my own woundedness and offers me a way to stay connected to my experience. When I am in tune to my discomfort, I am less likely to avoid your discomfort. Or to put it another way: when I am able to show up to my suffering, I can also show up to yours." 71

"Keeping our eyes open, senses alert. You never really know what might happen. This is how I want to learn to want to be free. Not in search for a perfect monastic mountaintop far away from the problems of the world, but on the ready, among the many, singing each other's radical wisdom, waking up to ourselves, our dead, to their hearts and hunger, to their dreams of someday, I believe." 85

"Without inner change, there can be no outer change, without collective change, no change matters." 89

"I have this theory that racism is required in order to keep capitalism in place. There is the form of capitalism that we have - and I'm not mad at trade and exchange and barter and all of that - but cancerous capitalism, hyper-capitalism, parasitic capitalism requires racism in order to keep it in place. It requires division of peoples so that we can have the people that consume, the people that are producing what is being consumed, and, frankly, the people that are consumed." 124

"Anything that takes you out of the system where you are producing something - I don't mean creating, I don't mean the things that nurture you and serve you and are generative for you - but when you drop out of the system and you are not productive, it will have consequences. But those consequences are part of the imagination of this system that says that we have to be producing and we have to be making something happen in order for us to have value, in order to effectively know who we are." 140

"And start identifying with this space of being loved, truly loved, and truly encouraged to be free and having the experience of what that means." 145

"Meditation is not the primary practice for most Buddhists in the world. The thick number of people who practice meditation would be here in the States and in the UK. I think it's not an accident that white convert sanghas are putting such a strong emphasis on non-relational ways of developing their sanghas." 164

"And ultimately, I think for me that's truly the bottom line. What am I doing to benefit myself and others?"173

"Transcendent movements require people to organize around issues beyond what people perceive they are affected by. How to do that? People have to experience their interdependence. To recognize that any limit to your ability to love limits my ability to love. One has to penetrate the truth of interdependence such that I am moved to a place in which I am not doing something for you, but it is actually about me, which is tied to you because there is, in absolute sense, no separation." 199

[quotes] Pleasure Activism - adrienne maree brown 2019

"It's important to say, we don't all have to love each other. Your clear 'no' makes the way for your 'yes.' Being able to say what we don't want allows us to clear the path."

"We should celebrate love in our community as a measure of healing. The expectation should be: I know we are all in need of healing, so how are we doing our healing work?"

"Make a commitment with five people to be more honest with each other, heal together, change together, and become a community of care that can grow to hold us all."

"Suffering is a massively important and absolutely true part of life, a spiritual reality. But I deeply believe we were not placed on this gorgeous, sensational planet to suffer. It is not the point."

"Oh, and practice saying no. Practice getting up and leaving. Practice saying, hey, I'm not feeling it, I gotta go. These are skills we're not taught and they are crucial."

"I guess it's true that the more we are brave, take risks, and try to bring our full selves to the table (or the bed, countertop, etc.) the more it encourages others to do the same. I know hurt people hurt people... but healing people heal people!"

"So do sex workers feel pleasure at work? Yeah. Because you know what feels amazing? Surviving capitalism."

"This one takes so much practice. Many of us are taught anti-consent practices as children, to hug and kiss whatever adult comes around asking for affection, that it's rude if we don't make the demanded contact. This culture of access based on power grows with us. Power gives an assumed total access of older people to younger people's bodies, white people to people of color's bodies, men to women's bodies, cis to trans bodies, those with resources to those with less, those with more physical strength to those with less. It's the way systems of hierarchy, domination, patriarchy, misogyny, and capitalism converge in the realm of flesh... practice makes this awareness transformative - asking if someone is open to physical contact, to a hug, to intimate touch, to sex begins to create a foundation of consent, a path to grow beyond the sick system we've been shaped by."

"All game is not created equal, and it's largely misunderstood. The quality of game is much more about being honest and being yourself than being smooth. It's not about small talk, filling the space, or easing the awkwardness. It's letting true desire and curiosity come to the forefront of the interaction."

"If I notice paranoia or anxiety creeping in, I remind myself that my mind is not the world and the future hasn't happened yet."

"I am a product of an imperfect world filled with people struggling to survive."

"When Lorde says 'having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing [the erotic's] power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves,' I understand her use of the erotic as a grounds for the struggle for global injustice for all beings, emerging out of the experience of true intimacy with myself, the world, and others, and accepting no less."

"Zizi's mantra for this one is (everyone sing after me): I have a big belly and I love my belly. Rub the bellies. Love the bellies. Reveal the bellies. Scratch the belles. (Do this twice a day for the rest of your life and you may have a chance to cope with shame.)"

"How about you suggest, try, attempt (maybe trust) this or that, rather than believe? There is very little space for humility in belief."

"I often think 'what is dinosaur humor,' you know? What was dinosaur humor, those moments where you're like: we're going extinct, let's enjoy it. Even if this is the end of the world, right, or the end of the world as we know it or the end of our species on this planet or whatever. Just do the fucking best you can and be the best person you can, put up the best fight you can, but then you also have to be able to laugh and release. Laughter increases our time. If you have time to tell a joke, you're not too rushed."

"I want people to see that what we create in the world is a reflection of what is inside of us. We cannot make that in the world that we have not made inside of us. Radical self-love is how we get to a just, equitable, and compassionate world."

"Now that I think of it, both loving and seeing are about connecting and transcending - your boundaries blur, and you're part of something bigger than just yourself. So maybe the greatest pleasure is transcendence."

[quotes] The Orchard of Lost Souls - Nadifa Mohamed 2013

  

"Kawsar's bones ache for sunlight, she has taken to sitting out for an hour most days just after the worst of the midday sun and basking in her orchard like a lizard."

"... and a shimmering portrait of Oodweyne faces Kawsar. A few rebels refuse to hold up their placards, making tiny little holes in his face, but the message is clear: the President is giant, a god who watches over them, who can dissolve into pieces and hear and see all that they do."

"More makeshift balls would have to be made from rags tied up with shoestring when the others crumbled under the stampede of toddlers and teenagers, girls and boys - the girls often just picking up a ball  in their hands and running to the goal because they couldn't understand why they shouldn't."

"'She is a child of her time.' 'No, it is the other way around: Those with sick hearts have made the time what it is.'"

"It isn't the cleanliness she is used to - patches of her skin have not touched any water at all - but it is enough to make her feel human again; soap, warm water, and the touch of another's hand has that power now."

"She doesn't want food that prolongs her life; she only wants to sustain her soul while it remains in her body."

"Only such a violent country could deserve such a violent rain."

"Children are sometimes swept along with the torrent, their bodies found miles away alongside drowned cows and mangled bicycles. From desperate drought to desperate flood, it seems as if Somalis can only expect disaster."

"It was the first time the young country had needed to beg the former colonial rulers, and since then the government hasn't stopped asking; from floods to famines to tractors and X-ray machines, prayer mats turned to the west and knees bent in supplication."

"Farah had bought it for Kawsar and she imagines his eyes consuming her body."

"'That can all happen if you're as poor as mud. I'd rather have worries like that with cash in my pocket than have ten sons and nothing to give them but black tea.'"

"Filsan feels like an orphaned child rather than just a motherless one."

"... a gun makes a soldier even out of a woman."

"They are talking about a woman one of them has had sex with in a way that makes the woman sound like some kind of animal he has caught and killed."

"It seems as if this wild terrain had determined the character of the people or had attracted like-minded spirits to dwell upon it."

"It was only her who listened to the rules, who feared breaking them - no one told her it was fine to steal or fuck or kill as long as it was kept quiet."

"'An end to it all. The whole population has to be resettled to stop the terrorists taking over.'"

"It is easier to leave her mother to the past, that wound is mostly healed and there is nothing to gain by picking at it."

"How would she even know if she had died? There is no one to wail or weep beside her."

"... it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight."

"There must be a hunch-backed, toothless sorceress somewhere who weaves all these disparate people together, thinks Kawsar, who carelessly throws this child together with me, while families are ripped apart."

"... the songbirds that haven't fled begin to trill, calling out disoriented, despondent songs to one another for comfort. They will have to be the poets recording what happened here, indignation puffing their chests and opening their throats wide, the sorrowful notes catching in the trees and falling, if life returns, like dust over heads that would rather forget."

"Filsan pushes deeper into the wheelbarrow to keep it moving... Bolts of pain shoot up and down her spine and she endures it silently, seeing them as part of the restitution she has to make, a physical purification if not a spiritual one."

"She is back in her familiar world; the war and all that time in Hargeisa just a complicated trial to achieve what she always wanted: a family, however makeshift."

[quotes] On the Duty of Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau 1849

  

"The character of the voter is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, or wish it to prevail through the power of the majority."

"There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, it because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who assets his own freedom by his vote."

"I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong."

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever."

"The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the Senate comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."

[quotes] Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela 1994

 

"I always remember the regent's axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind."

"Until then, I had never known anyone who married outside his tribe. We had been taught that such unions were taboo. But seeing Frank and his wife began to undermine my parochialism and loosen the hold of the tribalism that still imprisoned me. I began to sense my identity as an African, not just a Thembu or even a Xhosa."

"Fort Hare, like Clarkebury and Healdtown, was a missionary college. We were exhorted to obey God, respect the political authorities, and be grateful for the educational opportunities afforded to us by the church and the government. These schools have often been criticized for being colonialists in their attitudes and practices. Yet, even with such attitudes, I believe their benefits outweighed their disadvantages. The missionaries built and ran schools when the government was unwilling or unable to do so."

"Gold-mining on the Witwatersrand was costly because the ore was low grade and deep under the earth. Only the presence of cheap labor in the form of thousands of Africans working long hours for little pay with no rights made gold-mining profitable for the mining houses - white-owned companies that became wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus on the backs of the African people."

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."

"I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the oppressed."

"I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise."

"They reminded us that the freedom struggle was not merely a question of making speeches, holding meetings, passing resolutions, and sending deputations, but of meticulous organization, militant mass action, and, above all, the willingness to suffer and sacrifice."

"Malan's platform as known as apartheid. Apartheid was a new term but an old idea. It literally means 'apartness' and it represented the codification in one oppressive system of all the laws and regulations that had kept Africans in an inferior position to whites for centuries."

"I was first and foremost an African nationalist fighting for our emancipation from minority rule and the right to control our own destiny. But at the same time, South Africa and the African continent were part of the larger world. Our problems, while distinctive and special, were not entirely unique, and a philosophy that placed those problems in an international and historical context of the greater world and the course of history was valuable."

"As part of the M-Plan, the ANC introduced an elementary course of political lectures for its members throughout the country. These lectures were meant not only to educate but to hold the organization together."

"Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do. But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon."

"As I listened to Conco and Luthuli, I thought that here, probably for the first time in their lives, the judges were listening not to their domestic servants who said only what they knew their masters would like to hear, but to independent and articulate Africans spelling out their political beliefs and how they hoped to realize them."

"Our mandate was to wage acts of violence against the state - precisely what form those acts would take was yet to be decided. Our intention was to begin with what was least violent to individuals but most damaging to the state."

"In each new country, I would initially seal myself away in our hotel familiarizing myself with information about the country's policies, history, and leadership. Robbie did the opposite. A natural extrovert, he would leave the hotel as soon as we arrived and hit the streets, learning by seeing and talking to people."

"In Liberia, I met with President Tubman, who not only gave me five thousand dollars for weapons and training, but said in a quiet voice, 'Have you any pocket money?' I confessed that I was a bit low, and instantly an aide came back with an envelope containing four hundred dollars in cash."

"In a way I had never quite comprehended before, I realized the role I could play in court and the possibilities before me as a defendant. I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor, the representative of the great ideals of freedom, fairness, and democracy in a society that dishonored those virtues. I realized then and there that I could carry on the fight even within the fortress of the enemy."

"Two days before Judge de Wet was due to give his decision, the U.N. Security Council (with four abstentions, including Great Britain and the United States) urged the South African government to end the trial and grant amnesty to the defendants."

"That night, as I lay on the mat on the floor of my cell, I ran over the reasons for de Wet's decision. The demonstrations throughout South Africa and the international pressure undoubtedly weighed on his mind."

"The campaign to improve conditions in prison was part of the apartheid struggle. It was, in that sense, all the same; we fought injustice wherever we found it, no matter how large, or how small, and we fought injustice to preserve our humanity."

"But the human body has an enormous capacity for adjusting to trying circumstances. I have found that one can bear the unbearable if one can keep one's spirits strong even when one's body is being tested. Strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation; your spirit can be full even when your stomach is empty."

"It was a useful reminder that all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency, and that if their heart is touched, they are capable of changing. Ultimately, Badenhorst was not evil; his inhumanity had been foisted upon him by an inhuman system. He behaved like a brute because he was rewarded for brutish behavior."

"Kruger seemed as ignorant of these episodes in the history of his own people as he was of the Freedom Charter. It is difficult to negotiate with those who do not share the same frame of reference."

"Black Consciousness was less a movement than a philosophy and grew out of the idea that blacks must first liberate themselves from the sense of psychological inferiority bred by three centuries of white rule. Only then could the people rise up in confidence and truly liberate themselves from repression."

"My first experience in the garden was at Fort Hare where, as part of the university's manual labor requirement, I worked in one of my professor's gardens and enjoyed the contact with the soil as an antidote to my intellectual labors."

"An oppressive system cannot be reformed, I said, it must be entirely cast aside."

"I did not dwell on the prospect of my release, but on all the many things I had to do before then. As so often happens in life, the momentousness of an occasion is lost in the welter of a thousand details."

"I felt - even at the age of seventy-one - that my life was beginning anew. My ten thousand days in imprisonment were over."

"I was asked as well about the fears of whites. I knew that people expected me to harbor anger toward whites. But I had none. In prison, my anger toward whites decreased, but my hatred for the system grew. I wanted South Africa to see that I loved even my enemies while I hated the system that turned us against one another."

"What struck me so forcefully was how small the planet had become during my decades in prison; it was amazing to me that a teenaged Innuit living at the roof of the world could watch the release of a political prisoner on the southern tip of Africa. Television had shrunk the world, and had in the process become a great weapon for eradicating ignorance and promoting democracy."

"On the evening of May 2, Mr. de Klerk made a gracious concession speech. After more than three centuries of rule, the white minority was conceding defeat and turning over power to the black majority."

"Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character. My country is rich in the minerals and gems that lie beneath its soil, but I have always known that its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purest diamonds."

"In that way, my commitment to my people, to the millions of South Africans I would never know or meet, was at the expense of the people I knew best and loved most. It was as simple and yet as incomprehensible as the moment a small child asks her father, 'Why can you not be with us?' And the father must utter the terrible words: 'There are other children like you, a great many of them...' and then one's voice trails off."

"Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me."

[quotes] The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1848

   

Introduction

"We tend to think of Marx and Engels as fierce old men with piles of white hair and bushy beards, whose huge disembodied heads are painted on giant red banners borne aloft by faceless thousands of marching men through the streets of a totalitarian capital [...] In fact, when Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto they were unknown young men in their late twenties, whose beards were not yet bushy, whose hair was not yet in the least white, who despised solders, and who hated all despotic states."

"Marx often felt compelled to give a narrow economic definition of the bourgeoisie - 'the owners of the means of capitalist production'."

---

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous 'cash payment.' [...] It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere."

"Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers."

"In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer."

"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society."

"A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems."

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKINGMEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!"

[quotes] Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde 1984

 

"She is at the cutting edge of consciousness."

"She writes from the particulars of who she is: Black woman, lesbian, feminist, mother of two children, of Grenadian immigrants, educator, cancer survivor, activist."

"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

"For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt."

"Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences."

"Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work - come to ask you, are you doing yours?"

"Kujichagulia - self-determination - the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others."

"... for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken."

"The erotic is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."

"The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference."

"... so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea."

" That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife."

"Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives."

"For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society."

"In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept the powerlessness..."

"And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love."

"Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama."

"We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings."

"The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women."

"And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love."

"The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences."

"Not just the death of King, but what it meant. I have always had the sense o Armageddon and it was much stronger in those days, the sense of living on the edge of chaos. Not just personally, but on the world level. That we were dying, that we were killing our world - that sense had always been with me."

"I knew, as I had always known, that the only way you can head people off from using who you are against you is to be honest and open first, to talk about yourself before they talk about you."

"... in a country here racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable."

"Whatever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes."

"Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing."

"I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition."

"The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women who identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference."

"Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change."

"Yes, I am Black and Lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference."

"I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotten from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you."

"The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia."

"You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identifies."

"Growing up, metabolizing hatred like daily bread. Because I am Black, because I am woman, because I am not Black enough, because I am not some particular fantasy of woman, because I AM."

"Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past."

"When I can recognize my worth, I can recognize yours."

"We are never good enough for each other. All your faults become magnified reflections of my own threatening inadequacies. I must attack you first before our enemies confuse us with each other."

"I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other."

"Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves."

[quotes] When Things Fall Apart - Pema Chödrön 1997

 

"This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are."

"The word for loving-kindness in Sanskrit is maitri. Maitri is also translated as unconditional friendliness."

"Practicing loving-kindness toward ourselves seems as good a way as any to start illuminating the darkness of difficult times."

"The still lake without ripples is an image of our minds at ease, so full of unlimited friendliness for all the junk at the bottom of the lake that we don't feel the need to churn up the waters just to avoid looking at what's there."

"The trick is to enjoy fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea."

"Not wandering in the world of desire is about relating directly with how things are. Loneliness is not a problem. Loneliness is nothing to be solved. The same is true for any other experience we might have."

"Impermanence is meeting and parting. It's falling in love and falling out of love. Impermanence is bittersweet, like buying a new shit and years later finding it as part of a patchwork quilt."

"When you fall in love, recognize it as impermanence, and let that intensity the preciousness. When a relationship ends, recognize it as impermanence."

"But honesty without kindness makes us feel grim and mean, and pretty soon we start looking like we've been sucking on lemons."

"What we hate in ourselves, we'll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will also have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at."

"Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means 'noble or awakened heart.' It is said to be present in all beings. Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me."

"To have even a few seconds of doubt about the solidity and absolute truth of our own opinions, just to begin to see that we do have opinions, introduces us to the possibility of egolessness. We don't have to make these opinions go away, and we don't have to criticize ourselves for having them. We could just notice what we say to ourselves and see how so much of it is just our particular take on reality, which may or may not be shared by other people."

"The samaya relationship with a vajrayana teacher is meant to help us: it's meant to introduce us to the fact that if we could have an unconditional relationship with even one person, we could have an unconditional relationship with the world."

"Even if we live to be 108, our life will be too short for witnessing all its wonders. The dharma is each act, each thought, each word we speak."

"Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we're going to be more cheerful in the future, it's because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now."

[quotes] Emergent Strategy - Adrienne Maree Brown 2017

 

"Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind."

"But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies."

"While my default position is wonder, I am not without critique, disappointment, frustration, and even depression when I contemplate humanity."

"I follow other people's leadership around math, I offer leadership around healing, which comes more naturally to me. That give and take creates room for micro-hierarchies in a collaborative movement."

"Perhaps humans' core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion."

"I am listening now with all of my senses, as if the whole universe might exist just to teach me more about love."

"She also said 'all that you touch you change/ all that you change, changes you.'"

"Grace started asking us what our movements would look like if we focused on critical connections instead of critical mass."

"Emergent strategies are ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions."

"We all need a place where we can weep and be held and feel our feelings and figure out how those feelings can direct our next evolution."

"... what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole of society."

"internalize demands
you are the one
you are waiting for
externalize love
bind us together into
a greater self"

"Grace taught me dialectical humanism - the cycle of collective transformation of beliefs that occurs as we gather new information and experiences, meaning that, over time, we can understand and hold a position we previously believed to be wrong."

"I apply this to my songs, my self-portraits, my poems - understanding that when a Black, queer, thick artist woman intentionally takes space, it creates a new world."

"There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it."

"Grace often said that every crisis is an opportunity, which is amazing theoretically, and requires great emotional fortitude in practice, as well as the maturity to understand that the negative realization of that theory is 'disaster capitalism.'"

"We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together."

"Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what's already possible, to leave impossible alone."

"... until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won't be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally."

"In movement work, I have been facilitating groups to shift from a culture of strategic planning to one of strategic intentions - what are our intentions, informed by our vision? What do we need to be and do to bring our vision to pass? How do we bring those intentions to life throughout every change, in every aspect of our work?"

"As an individual, get really good at being intentional with where you put your energy, letting go as quickly as you can of things that aren't part of your visionary life's work."

"This is something I have been working on, engaging my anger and actually releasing it in harmless ways when it's live in me."

"... 'do here what we are seeking to do in the world.'"

"Do you already know that your existence - who and how you are - is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you?"

"On so many levels, interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible, as your truer self."

"I love knowing how incredible it feels to have a need met, to be loved and cared for, and also know how incredible it feels to meet an authentic need."

"No one is special, and everyone is needed."

"Don't sit this out. It has room for you. Find out, start, or help shape what is happening in your town."

"Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once."

"Be able to say: 'I invest my energy in what I want to see grow. I belong to efforts I deeply believe in and help shape those.'"

"It is only in relation to other bodies and many somebodies that anybody is somebody. Don't get into your cotton-picking mind that you are somebody in yourself."

"...This may include being far away from each other (physically, and in social media, and in all communications) in the short term.""

"You have to tell your story. The silence and shame around these dynamics makes people think they are alone and especially flawed."

"Pick one person in your life right now, someone you want a more authentic relationship with, and tell them exactly that. Ask if you can practice radical honesty together. It is difficult at first, but the results are unparalleled freedom and satisfaction."

"Sometimes this was because the takedown wouldn't have had the impact I wanted; destroying a person doesn't destroy all of the systems that allow harmful people to do harm."

"The more people who cocreate the future, the more people whose concerns will be addressed from the foundational level in this world."

"In beginning this work, notice who you feel drawn to, and where you find ease. And notice who challenges you, who makes the edges of your ideas grow or fortify. I find that my best work has happened during my most challenging collaborations, because there are actual differences that are converging and creating more spaces, ways forward that serve more than one worldview."

"'... The most powerful thing for organizers to have, I believe, is faith. This belief that we can win, that we can change the world, that we can all be better.' - Terry Marshall"

"... conversation is a crucial way to explore what we believe and to make new understandings and ideas possible."

"I also think consensus is like water. Many paths, but the future is the ocean. Like we can resist, but it is inevitable, we will have to get together eventually."

"I have sets of woes - people who know my north star, who know my challenges, and who hold me accountable to my own development, celebrating my self-awareness and growth."

"Often the biggest support we need is to speak the truth out loud to those who will hold it with us from a vantage point of unconditional love."

"All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist."

"The best way to practice visionary fiction is to get to writing."

"Metta meditation is a very simple ritual of developing lovingkindness towards yourself and the whole world. As you meditate you say, to yourself or outloud, 'May I be happy, may I be wealthy, may I be free from harm and suffering.' And then you repeat it for someone you love, someone you feel aversion to, and then for the whole world."

"There are always a ton of relevant conversations that could happen, but there is usually a very small set of conversations that a particular group, at a particular moment in history, can have and move forward, given their capacity, resources, time, focus, and beliefs."

"We will not wait to be perfect, because we believe the time is now and we would rather be held accountable for our mistakes than forgiven our inaction."

"Be open to someone else speaking your truth."

"The vision of an organization is the furthest it can see."

"Identifying what your group can do well, is passionate about, and is needed - that's the sweet spot. That's your mission."

"Learning in community helps us see how our own ideas are shifting over time. Hopefully we develop a change with time, applying life experience to our way of seeing the world."

"Community is an incredible way to get access to information you might not come across on your own."

"Without intention, we are usually practicing what the dominant society wants us to practice - competing with each other to be cogs in a system that benefits the owning class, vaguely religious, vaguely patriotic."

"Practice saying 'yes' to the ideas that come from others, growing the idea with yes after yes. When you are tempted to say 'no,' try asking 'how?' instead."

"It changed the world, even if it is/was only in tiny ways that can't be seen, measured."

[quotes] The Other Side of Paradise - Staceyann Chin 2009

 

"'Talia, sometimes I wish I could just forget about boys altogether and just get to a woman when I get big!'" 

"I am tired of pretending. But I am too afraid that no one will like me without the parts of me I have worked so hard to make up."

"'White, Chinese, Syrian -  is the same thing! You not Black like we. You can get ahead in life. The rest of we just have to stay right here till we dead."

"'And therein lies the greatest fiction about America. It is never about just anything. It is always about something else. Something big. When it comes to the USA, other seemingly unconnected things are always connected.'"

"Then I wonder if I am just curious also. Maybe I just want to sleep with a girl so I can say I tried it. But I'm not so convinced when I spend the days hoping that Tanya or Belinda or Francine will take a chance and invite me up to their dorms to 'experiment.'"

"Fuck, this is New York City! You can be anything you goddamned wanna be."

"There are plenty of girls who allow for some sexual intimacy under the guise of exploration, but they stop talking to me when they find out that I want to be exclusive. The more it happens, the angrier I become."

"I wish I could just go straight to the police and report it. But I can never tell anyone how silent the brave Staceyann Chin was in that room."

"I think about how I let those hands touch me - how I did not say anything while they did what they wanted to me."

"I do not feel so alone when I can see the sky."

"I refuse to grow old kissing the woman I love under the cover of night and pretending I don't know her the next day."

"In my heart of hearts I don't want to leave either, but I don't see a way I can stay. Plus the wheels have been set to turning and I am already on my way."

"It takes all my willpower not to say that I intend to be away until it is safe for Jamaicans to be openly gay. I try not to think of how long that might be."

"And when I visit them in Jamaica, I am often caught between anger at the suffering I endured in the years I spent with them and understanding that, more often than not, people did the best they could under the remarkably difficult and pressing circumstances."

[quotes] Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2013

 

"Ele se virou para ela e disse 'Ate que enfim' quando o trem finalmente chegou ragendo, com aquela familiaridade the os estranhos adotam uns com os outros depois de compartilhas a decepcao com um servico publico." - 10

"Como era possivel sentir falta de algo que nao queria mais? Blaine precisava daquilo the ela nao podia dar, e ela precisa daquilo que ele nao podia dar. Ifemelu lamentava por isso, pela perda do que poderia ter sido." - 14

"Aquilo lhe causava uma estranheza desorintadora, porque sua mente nao mudara no mesmo ritmo que sua vida, e ele sentia um espaco oco entre si proprio e a pessoa que supostamente era." - 35

"Ifemelu pousou a cabeca contra a de Obinze e sentiu, pela primera vez, o que sentiria em muitas outras ocasioes com ele: uma autoafeicao. Ele fazia com que ela gostasse de si mesma." - 69

"Hispanicos sao frequentes companheiros dos negros americanos nos indices de pobreza, um pequeno passo acima deles na hierarquia racial do pais. A raca unclui a mulher de pele chocolate do Peru; os povos indigenas do Mexico; pessoas com cara de mesticas da Republica Dominicana; pessoas mais branquinhas de Porto Rico; e o cara louro de olhos azuis da Argentina. Voce so precisa falar espanhol e nao ser da Espanha e, voila, pertence a uma raca chamada hispanico." - 116

"Ifemelu lhe contou sobre a vez em que Allison disse: 'Ei, a gente vai comer um negocio. Venha tambem!', e ela achou que era um convinte e que, como acontecia nos convites na Nigeria, Allison ou uma das outras pagaria a conta." - 141

"Ali, Ifemelu tinha uma leve sensacao acalentadora de renovavao. Ali, ela nao precisava se explicar." - 152

"Com Blaine, ela teve certeza: ele era descendente dos negros e negras que estavam nos Estados Unidos havia centenas de anos." - 193

"Nos Estados Unidos, o tribalismo vai muito bem, obrigado. Existem quatro tipos: de classe, ideologia, regiao e raca. Em primeiro lugar, vamos ao de classe. E bem facil. Ele separa os ricos dos pobres." - 201

"Reconheceu nela o nacionalismo dos americanos liberais que criticavam abundantemente os Estados Unidos, mas nao gostavam que voce o fizesse; esperavam que voe fosse silencioso e grato, e sempre lembravam of quanto a America era melhor do que seu pais de origem." - 206

"Ojiugo usava batom laranja e jeans rasgado, falava sem rodeios e fumava em publico, provocando fofocas perversas e a antipatia de outras meninas, nao por fazer essas coisas, mas por ousar faze-las sem ter morado fora ou ter um pai estrangeiro, qualidade que as teriam feito perdoar sua falta de conformismo." - 258

"'Os paises europeus sao cercados por paises parecidos uns com or outros, enquanto a America tem o Mexico, que na verdade e um pais subdesenvolvido, e isso cria uma psicologia diferente em relacao a imigracao e as fronteiras.'" - 297

"Obinze tinha achado aquele um elogio estranho e guardado com carinho aquela imagem de si mesmo, talvez por saber que nao era inteiramente verdade." - 305

"Comecou a sentir um latejar doloroso por tras dos olhos, ouviu um mosquito zumbindo ali perto e, de forma subita e cheia de culpa, sentiu-se grata por ter um passaporte azul americano na bolsa. Aquilo a protegia da falta de escolhas. Ela sempre poderia ir embora; nao tinha de ficar ali." - 420

"Outras pessoas vieram participar da conversa, todas encerradas numa familiaridade, porque podiam usar as mesmas referencias com tanta facilidade. Logo, estavam todos rindo e listando as coisas americanas das quais sentiam falta." - 438

"'O problema de namorar uma pessoa de outra cultura e que voce passa muito tempo se explicando.'... Obinze ficou satisfeito ao ouvir isso, porque dava ao seu relacionamento com Ifemelu uma profundidade, uma ausencia de novidade superficial. Eles eram do mesmo lugar, mas ainda assim tinham muita coisa a dizer um para o outro." - 492

"O amor era uma especie de luto. Era isso que os romancistas queriam dizer quando falavam em sofrimento. Ifemelu sempre tinha achado meio boba a ideia de sofrer por amor, mas agora entendia." - 508

"A dor da ausencia dele nao diminui com o tempo; ao contrario, parecia ir mais fundo a cada dia, despertando nela lembrancas ainda mais vividas. Mesmo assim, Ifemelu estava em paz; por estar em casa, escrevendo seu blog, por ter descoberto Lagos de novo. Finalmente, havia se esgendrado num ser completo." - 510

[quotes] The Looting Machine - Tom Burgis 2015

 

"Slowly my terror eased. What it left behind was guilt. I felt I ought to suffer as those died had - if not the same way, then somehow to the same degree."

"Oil accounts for 98 per cent of Angola's exports and about three-quarters of the government's income. If is also the lifeblood of the Futungo. When the International Monetary Fund examined Angola's national accounts in 2001, it found that between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion had gone missing, a sum greater than the gross domestic product of each of forty-three African countries and equivalent to one in every four dollars that the Angolan economy generates annually."

"Depending on the vagaries of supply chains, if you have a PlayStation or a pacemaker, an iPod, a laptop or a mobile phone, there is roughly a one-in-five chance that a tiny piece of eastern Congo is pulsing through it."

"The more the state crumbles, the greater the need for each individual to make ends meet however they can; the greater the looting, the more the authority of the state withers."

"Nigeria may be the largest source of African energy exports, but it generates only enough electricity to power on toaster for every forty-four of its own people."

"There are, he said, sixteen factories in China dedicated to churning out textiles with the 'Made in Nigeria' badge sewn into them. For a time the Chinese material was of a much lower quality than Nigerian originals, but the gap narrowed as Chinese standards rose."

"The resource business ruptures the social contract between rulers and ruled... Instead of calling their rulers to account, the citizens of resource states are reduced to angling for a share of the loot."

"Annual steel production worldwide is 1.5 billion tonnes, or roughly one tonne for every five people. The biggest steelmakers, among them ArcelorMittal, India's Tata family and Baosteel of China, bestride a global industrial economy that needs steel for ships and bridges, and forks and scalpels."

"The ones speaking Afrikaans were presumably members of the rough-and-ready corps of white South African former soldiers who signed up as mercenaries after apartheid and who are now to be found scattered across Africa, guarding mines in Congo or attempting coups in Equatorial Guinea."

"The mining giants appeared more determined to plant their flag in the mountain than to mine it."

"Nuclear power stations supply three-quarters of France's electricity. Areva, the French state-owned atomic energy group, held sway over the stretches of nothern Niger under which lie some of the planet's richest seams of uranium. Areva mines about a third of its uranium in Niger, with the rest coming from Canada and Kazakhstan. It is the world's biggest nuclear company, and its annual revenues are twice Niger's gross domestic product."

"In 2008, sub-Saharan Africa, with a population of 900 million, produced as much electricity as Spain, with a population of 47 million."

"Although there was legitimate uproar when a Chinese ship that docked in South Africa was found to contain weapons bound for Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, any notion that China is the sole or even the main source of the oceans of weapons that slosh through Africa is misplaced. One study by two Norway-based academics, based on years of arms import statistics and governance indicators, found that the United States had a greater propensity than China to sell weapons to repressive African governments."

"Without exception, through the 1990s every country that borrowed from the World Bank did worse the more it depended on extractive industries."

"With no record of service to point to, politics becomes a game of mobilizing one's ethnic brethren. For us to win, they have to lose. The social contract is replaced with c compact of violence."

"Corruption does not start or end at the borders of Nigeria or Angola or Equatorial Guinea. Its proponents include some of the world's biggest companies, among them the blue-chip multinationals in which, if you live in the West and have a pension, your money is almost certainly invested."

"... but I think Achebe was seeking to make a wider point about the human spirit: it is capable of loving and of participating in horrors in the same afternoon."

"If you subtract your country's rank on the human development index from its rank on the GDP per head index, you get an indication of the extent to which economic growth is actually bettering the lot of the average person in that country."

"The system is still there: these investors can still form a company without saying who they are, they can still anchor their business in a country that is not concerned about investors' behaviour overseas, and, sadly, there's no shortage of resource-rich fragile states on which these investors can prey."

"Commodities from every continent blend together in the snaking supply chains of the global economy, and it is safe to say that there are incognito nuggets of Africa for sale on my east London high street just as there are in the malls of Los Angeles and the boutiques of Rome. Likewise, through pension funds invested in their shares, we all enjoy the profits of the giant corporations of the oil and mining industries."

[quotes] Good Economics for Hard Times - Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo 2019

 

"In many developing countries, there are often several missing rungs in the quality ladder of housing. The next thing in the slung might be the nice little flat entirely out of reach."

"It takes an ability to dream (Albert, Esther's grandfather, was seeking adventure rather than escaping from a bad situation), or a substantial dose of confidence, to overcome this tendency to persist with the status quo. This is perhaps why migrants, at least those not pushed out by desperation, tend to be not the richest or the most educated, but those who have some special drive, which is why we find so many successful entrepreneurs among them."

"There are always going to be a million ways to do cross-country comparisons, depending on exactly which brave assumptions one is willing to swallow."

"The outsized role of reputation means international trade is not just about good prices, good ideas, low tariffs, and cheap transportation. It is very difficult for a new player to enter and take over a market, because they start without reputation."

"This can set off a downward spiral. Laid-off workers spend less in local businesses, such as shops and restaurants. The value of their houses declines, sometimes catastrophically, since to a large extent the value of my house depends on how nicely your house is maintained. When most of the neighborhood starts to go down, everyone goes down together."

"Nearly a billion people worldwide live more than a mile from a paved road (one-third of them are in India), and nowhere near a train line."

"The fact that each individual decision is rational does not make the outcome desirable. Herd behavior generates information cascades: the information on which the first people base their decision will have an outsized influence on what all the others believe."

"In other words, people seemed to act as if they had multiple personalities, each with different preferences. The context picks the personality that gets to decide in a particular situation."

"The policies must effectively counterbalance the loss of self-confidence; old-fashioned government handouts are not going to work by themselves. What is needed is a wholesale rethinking of the social policy apparatus."

"A lot of the problem seems to be that these innovations take place in a void, insufficiently connected to the lives they wish to change. The core ideas are often clever, and it remains possible that one day they will click, but it is hard to place a lot of faith in this prospect."

"Unfortunately, notwithstanding the grandiose talk about singularities, the bulk of R&D resources these days is directed toward machine learning and other big data methods designed to automate existing tasks, rather than the invention of new products that would create new roles for workers, hence new jobs."

"So the point of the very high top tax rates of the 1950s and 1960s, which applied only to extremely high incomes, was not so much to 'soak the rich' as to eliminate them. Almost nobody ended up paying the top rates, because those very high incomes had all but disappeared."

"Therefore, when growth either fails or fails to benefit the average guy, a scapegoat is needed. This is particularly true in the United States, but is happening in Europe as well. The natural foils are immigrants and trade."

"It is precisely because governments do things the market will not touch that they become susceptible to corruption."

"In turn, this means bureaucrats tend to focus a lot on checking off the right boxes to avoid attracting attention. This creates a specific bias toward following the letter of the law, even when its spirit is somewhere entirely different."

"It is easy to forget, especially in a crisis, the need to protect as far as possible the dignity of those being helped."

"... out of the conviction that extreme poverty is not the result of the inferiority or inadequacy of a group of people, but of systemic exclusion. Exclusion and misunderstanding build on each other."

"What is common among a drought-affected farmer in India, a youth in Chicago's South Side, and a fifty-something white man who was just laid off? While they may have problems, they are not the problem. They are entitled to be seen for who they are and not be defined by the difficulties besieging them. Time and again, we have seen in our travels in developing countries that hope is the fuel that makes people go."

"What was made in Manchester mills moves to Mumbai factories and then to Myanmar and maybe, one day, to Mombasa or Mogadishu."

"The only recourse we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant, resist the seduction of the 'obvious', be skeptical of promised miracles, question the evidence, be patient with complexity and honest about what we know and what we can know. Without that vigilance, conversations about multifaceted problems turn into slogans and caricatures and policy analysis gets replaced by quack remedies."

"The call to action is not just for academic economists - it is for all of us who want a better, saner, more humane world. Economics is too important to be left to economists."

[quotes] A Darker Shade of Magic - V.E. Schwab 2015

 

"Aren't you afraid of dying?" He asked Lila now.
She looked at him as if it were a strange question. And then she shook her head. "Death comes for everyone," she said simply. "I'm not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here." She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. "I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still."

"She'd wanted freedom. She'd wanted adventure. And she didn't think she minded dying for it. She only wished dying didn't hurt so much."