"Above all, Americans have learned that the tremendous changes we now need and yearn for in our daily lives and in the direction of our country cannot come from those in power or from putting pressure on those in power. We ourselves have to foreshadow or prefigure them from the ground."
"With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy."
"... self-transformation and structural transformation must go hand in hand."
"In words that will resonate throughout this book, we must define revolution both by the humanity-stretching ends to be achieved and the beloved community-building means by which to achieve those ends."
"At a time when jobs and whole industries are collapsing, growing your own food seems reasonable."
"As Grace argues, Bush represents the end of an era - one dating back to the advent of capitalism and taking off with the rise of industrial society."
"... the change needed to overcome our mounting crises must be of revolutionary scale."
"These perilous times call for us to be both imaginative and generative. Time is precious. History awaits our response."
"Perhaps eighty million people have been killed in wars during my lifetime."
"At this point in the continuing evolution of our country and of the human race, we urgently need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and to recognize that we must each become a part of the solution because we are each a part of the problem."
"Each of us needs to stop being a passive observer of the suffering that we know is going on in the world and start identifying with the sufferers."
"The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country."
"Einstein asserted that the solution of world peace could arise only from inside the hearts of humankind. That is why 'imagination is more important than knowledge.'"
"He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"Freedom now included the responsibility for making choices."
"The social activists among us struggle to create actions that go beyond protest and negativity and build community because community is the most important thing that has been destroyed by the dominant culture."
"That is why linking Love and Revolution is an idea whose time has come."
"We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other."
"Now, in the light of our historical experiences and thanks especially to the indigenous cultures that the Zapatistas have revealed to us, we are beginning to understand that the world is always being made and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many 'others' in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization."
"Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness."
"Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers and to relate to other human beings."
"These two notions - that reality is constantly changing and that you must constantly be aware of the new and more challenging contradictions that drive change - lie at the core of dialectical thinking."
"The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle-class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world."
"We are the ones who must begin to live more simply so that others can simply live."
"Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our capacity for Love."
"Most people think of Love only in terms of affection, between lovers (eros) or friends (philia). However, King's experiences as a black man in racist America had taught him that love of power goes hand in hand with dominating and destroying community. So he developed a concept of Love (he called it 'Agape'), which is based on the willingness to go to any lengths to restore or create community."
"Gerald was unique in that his dreams were not only in his heart and head but also in his hands."
"Teach people what will truly help them, he said, not to become servants and bureaucrats for the Empire but to aid them in all the little things of village life. Education, he said, should be of the Heart, the Hand, and the Head."
"Healing our society will require the patient work not primarily of politicians but of artists, ministers, gardeners, workers, families, women, and communities. It will require new forms of governance, work, and education that are much more participatory and democratic than those collapsing all around us."
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