[quotes] They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom - Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri 2022

 

"Revolution, they believed, required first and foremost a level of consciousness, not just strategies for fighting or protesting. They raised people's consciousness through holding teach-ins and putting on cultural events."

"'if you uproot an olive tree, we'll plant one hundred instead!'"

"If I was successful in life but my success didn't help Palestine, then it wasn't truly a success. They planted this seed in us while we were very young, but even if they didn't, everything I had witnessed from a young age would have been enough to make the liberation of Palestine the main goal of my life."

"While I believe that it's the right of all colonized, occupied, and oppressed people to stand up to their oppressors, I've always been convinced that staying alive and conveying our message through unarmed resistance is more powerful and strategic than our dying. I can't serve the Palestinian cause if I'm dead."

"'Thank you for your tears,' I began. 'But I don't want your sadness. Nor do I want your money. Please save that for the people in your own country who need it."

"The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States was one of the worst things to happen to the Palestinian people in recent years."

"'I want to teach you all a course on international law and international humanitarian law, so you truly benefit from your time here by learning your rights and expanding your political consciousness.'"

"My time in her classroom is one of the many reasons I've never viewed this chapter of my life as a loss. In prison, I learned the virtue of patience, something I had always struggled with before. And in prison, instead of putting my own comfort and desires first, I learned how to be in a group and always fight for the interest of the collective."

"By their examples, Khalida and Khalto Yasmeen had taught me how to be a strong woman who advocated for herself and spoke truth to power. They had helped me understand the critical role women play in our society and in our struggle for liberation. Women make up half of society, and they raise the whole of it."

[quotes] Fugitive Visions: A Memoir - Jane Jeong-Trenka 2009

 

"Between love and rejection lies fear."

"Keeping a Protestant family together hinges on the beliefs that everyone is the same and nobody should be treated different and nobody should get anything special - which is not faith in the invisible, but invisibility."

"My mother feels that she has to choose between two things: her own goodness or the truth of my experience. In the end, she chooses her own goodness."

"But what was more immediately pressing than criticism from strangers or my being Asian American or his being white was that every day people have to eat. People can fall in love over a series of dinners. They can fall out of love the same way."

"If they knew the true nature of desperation, would you still use the word 'choice' as a synonym for the relinquishment or abandonment of a child?"

"They didn't know that adoption would erase the people who we once were so completely, so irrevocably. Our adoptions would take our language, our culture, our families, our names, our birth dates, our citizenship, and our identities in a perfectly legal process. And the world would view it as charitable and ethical."

"Meanwhile, the praise Koreans lavish upon white people who are trying to speak Korean brings my tentative speech to a screeching halt. The same low level of proficiency that is considered a great accomplishment for a white person is just more proof of defectiveness in an adoptee."

"My lover says, I slept with a lot of women just to sleep with them. Men can do that. Doesn't he know that women can do that too, that a woman's loneliness can be as penetrating as a man's, that a woman can fill herself with man after man, easily, wake up the next morning feeling hollow, so easily, can do that..."

"Jae-dal, you are the son of a white man, and I am the daughter of a white man. We are Americans living in Korea. Your father a soldier, my mother's first husband a soldier, a war that we never lived through but that marks us, that we can neither remember nor forget."

"When a beautiful fairy tale crumbles in your hands, what remains?"

"I fled the U.S. during its war against terror. The Americans had not yet taken the children of Afghanistan or Iraq for adoption, though they tried, because every war displaces family members and creates orphans. I had become more and more a foreigner in my own country, an unpatriot."

"Without a lover, I had such exquisite, cruel freedom."

"If I had been born the first son of my Korean father - not his fifth daughter - I don't think he would have tried to smother me with a blanket when I was born. I probably would have grown up in Korea and continued my father's family line."

"What else could I want? Why am I still not happy? I feel better when I have few connections, few obligations, few things, no furniture. What was I thinking when I ripped up all the sod in the back lawn and planted a garden of vegetables, herbs, and flowers? The following summer I gave my friends all the perennials - the hollyhocks, coneflowers, rosemary, and strawberry vines. I had even told myself that I would wait a decade for the asparagus to mature, but that too I dug up by its roots and distributed in cardboard boxes with the rest."

"Strangers become lovers and then strangers again."

"Although we have traveled oceans and spent all our money just to be together, this is a sad and empty kind of togetherness when everything's cool, it's all OK, everyone can make their own choices and it's not anyone else's problem or responsibility, nothing matters."

"The futility of love, the indifference of the world, and the responsibility of freedom are the tree things that I learned from watching Dominique's life."

[quotes] Living for Change - Grace Lee Boggs 1998

 

[I cried twice reading the book. First when I saw pictures of Grace still showing up at protests in her 80s and again when reading about Jimmy’s death. This book has filled me with renewed hope and excitement for the future and opened new avenues of exploration of curiosity. Reading Grace’s story makes me feel part of a sacred lineage of revolutionaries and visionaries and dreamers. That she was thinking about the meaning of community with her friends in 1968 gives me hope. The resonating question I am carrying forward is how I can grow to love a people and place enough to want to change it? And what are the relationships I need to nurture to grow in that love?] 

“Jimmy was always reminding us that in ourselves we are nobodies. ‘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.’”

“Slowly but surely I was being prepared to take my place in the world. For if we shape reality by how we think, we can also change reality by what we do.”

“Over the years my dissatisfaction with American schools has been heavily influenced by Dewey’s insistence that education be of the hand as well as the head and his allegation that the preoccupation of Western philosophers with the head has its roots in ancient Greece, where manual work was considered inferior because it was done by women and slaves.”

“My approach to political questions came more from books, his from experience. We struggled over almost every issue. But I felt myself growing from the struggle, and I could also see the growth in him.”

“In retrospect, I suspect that his confidence in his own judgment and his boldness in making projections, which never ceased to amaze me, came in part from his relationship with elders. Constantly talking over the past with old folks apparently provided him with a solid foundation for evaluating the present and building the future.”

“Jimmy believed that revolutions should be made for love of people and place, not because of hate.”

“He had no illusions about the electoral system, but voting for him was a confirmation and continuing reaffirmation of his citizenship and his readiness to take responsibility for running Detroit and American society.”

“His ideas, while still brilliant, struck me as increasingly abstract because he was not rooted in any place or any ongoing struggle.”

“My ideas were beginning to come from reality and not just from books. I had voted in every election, something that, as a radical, I had previously disdained to do. I was no longer a nomad but a citizen. Detroit had become my home, the place and the city for which I felt responsible.”

“A Negro Revolution is the kind which liberal whites could accept because it would simply incorporate the black man into the corruption of existing white society. A Black Revolution, however, would center around struggle for control of ‘land’ (economic resources) and would have to take the steps necessary for such control.”

“Today, nearly thirty years later, despite the loss of hundreds of thousands like Harvey to street violence, drugs, and prison, this street force is even larger than it was in 1968. It is also more desperate because with the export of production jobs overseas, more and more of our young people are seen and see themselves as expendable. At the same time, there is no longer the same readiness to sacrifice, the same confidence in themselves as agents for revolutionary change that moved thousands of black street youth to join the party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”

“Jimmy never tired of saying that just coming out of your mother’s womb does not make you a human being. He insisted that people become human through the choices that they make. Malcolm, he reminded us, had transformed himself from a hustler to a man ready to take responsibility for his own life and the lives of his people.”

“But Jimmy was equally demanding of blacks. Being a victim of oppression in the United States, he insisted, is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother’s womb is not enough to make you human.”

“To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/spiritual leap and become more human human beings. In order to change/ transform the world, they must change/ transform themselves.”

“Hocker’s stories gave me an opportunity to distinguish between the church and religion, and to analyze religion as something that human beings down through the ages have created to help us understand our place in the universe and provide us with the moral energy to carry on struggles between right and wrong.”

“Even though he would not be caught using the word, he knew our capacity to create, to love, to think unthinkable thoughts, to see the unseen. He knew that we are sacred and that we have a great capacity to struggle, to change, to transform ourselves, to change the world.”

“At one point I initiated a heated discussion in our little group by proposing that since one of the most important contributions of the women’s movement has been its critique of scientific rationalism, we should propose a ten-year moratorium on scientific research so that the world can grapple with the fundamental question of whether we should do things just because we have the know-how and power to do them.”

“Instead of using schools as institutions to advance individual careers, I argued, we must start turning them into places to develop our children into responsible citizens - by involving them in community-building activities, such as planting community gardens, preparing school and community meals, building playgrounds, cleaning up our rivers and neighborhoods.”

“I knew Jimmy was going to die, but I didn’t expect it. The difference is subtle but real. When you expect something, you imagine it. But Jimmy remained so alert and active almost to the very end that I never imagined being on my own.”

“In the past few years I have gotten into the habit of referring to one of my favorite passages in The Sayings of Confucius: ‘At fifteen I thought only of study; at thirty I began playing my role; at forty I was sure of myself; at fifty I was conscious of my position in the universe; at forty I was sure of myself; at fifty I was conscious of my position in the universe; at sixty I was no longer argumentative; and now at seventy I can follow my heart’s desire without violating custom.”

“Ping never decided which groups or causes to support on the basis of their chances for success. As he put it, ‘It is not necessary to succeed in order to strive.’”

“I was reminded of Dorothy Garner’s insistence that we have to stop thinking that every problem has to be solved by an expert.”

“If we go along with the global economy, which means the export of jobs to wherever labor is cheapest, our deindustrialized cities will become increasingly dependent on casino gambling and new sports stadiums as our local ‘industries,’ both of which reinforce capitalist values, consumerism, and individualism and thus lead to more crime, violence, and disunity.”

“In recent years, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is becoming clearer to me that just as we should not try to create twenty-first-century cities that look like twentieth-century ones, we should not try to make twenty-first-century revolutions on the model of twentieth-century ones.

[quotes] When They Call You a Terrorist - Asha Bandele, Patrisse Cullors 2018

  

"This neighborhood, this world, is all I have known, it's what I have loved, despite the hardship I don't really know as hardship because it's how everyone lives."

"And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready."

"We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out."

"Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state."

"Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close."

"In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising."

"If we did not die, we could go to prison, where we could work for the State of California and corporate brands we could not afford to buy."

"But so ineffective were these laws [gang statutes] that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activity, 10,000 young people were killed.

"Donna Hill, a simple, single Black woman with a heart that could carry a universe, becomes my first spirit guide, the first and most clear example I have as a young adult of what it means to receive a gift you can only properly show gratitude for by sharing it with others."

"I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it's mostly a lie meant to keep you from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people's paths, that undo people's lives."

"But now that race isn't written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn't rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says."

"He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts."

"How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?"

"In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life."

"How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society - to not take care of the least of these?"

"From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing."

"I do know that in my heart, the heart dedicated to Black liberation, I love people. Period. I love complicated, imperfect, beautiful people. People, I suppose, like me."

"We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts - like possessiveness and jealousy - are minimized as much as humanly possible so that all eyes, hearts and spirits are not distracted from the goal. And the goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don't matter."

"Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade."

"It's hard to be intimate with one person when you're being intimate with the world."

"We think about ways we could co-parent and partner without being married. I like how I feel in the space with JT, both liberated and connected."

"One by one each of us finds a chair - this is why I am barefoot, why we came in barefoot. And one by one almost all of us begin to speak: 
If I die in police custody, know that they killed me.
If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother.
If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live."

"You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the world of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don't even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like."

[quotes] Angela Davis an Autobiography - Angela Davis 1974

 

"There was the possibility that, having read it, more people would understand why so many of us have no alternative but to offer our lives - our bodies, our knowledge, our will - to the cause of our oppressed people."

"The isolation units which had existed in the past had been dismantled years ago, in an effort to remove from view the most blatant stances of inhumanity. Needless to say, that had not succeeded; inhumanity seethed from all the cracks and crevices of that place."

"They all explained that they had been driven by necessity to apply for this kind of job. Apparently it was one of the highest-paying jobs in New York that did not require a college education. In a way, these officers were prisoners themselves, and some of them were keenly aware that they were treading ambiguous waters. Like their predecessors, the Black overseers, they were guarding their sisters in exchange for a few bits of bread. And like the overseers, they too would discover that part of the payment for their work was their own oppression."

"The other weekly meeting place was the movies - that is, if the projector was not broken. Not even the curiosity that attracted me to the church services could make me attend one of these insipid Hollywood movies. Needless to say, it was a favorite trysting place for homosexual couples."

"Once I felt settled in the main population, my thoughts naturally turned toward the possibility of collective political activity in jail. Many people are unaware of the fact that jail and prison are two entirely different institutions... Jails are primarily for pretrial confinement, holding places until prisoners are either convicted or found innocent. More than half of the jail population have never been convicted of anything, yet they languish in these cells. Because the bail system is inherently biased in the favor of the relatively well-off, jails are disproportionately inhabited by the poor, who cannot afford the fee."

"Then it occurred to me that anyone in his place would have done the same thing - it was the madness of the institution he served that was driving him to hysterically search the hem of my skirt and the seams of my blouse."

"She seemed a fitting representative of the government of California. That state held the dubious distinction of being one of the most advanced in the country when it came to quelling resistance. California could already claim more than its share of victims. I could trace the history of my political involvement there by the number of funerals I had attended."

"The more steeped in violence our environment became, the more determined my father and mother were that I, the first-born, learn that the battle of white against Black was not written into the nature of things. On the contrary, my mother always said, love had been ordained by God. White people's hatred of us was neither natural nor eternal."

"The white people in the store were at first confused when they saw two Black people sitting in the 'whites only' section, but when they heard our accents and conversations in French, they too seemed to be pleased and excited by seeing Black people from so far away they could not possibly be a threat."

"This was my first introduction to class differences among my own people. We were the not-so-poor. Until my experiences at school, I believed that everyone else lived the way we did."

"On the one hand, there was a strong tendency affirming our identity as Black people that ran through all the school activities. But on the other hand, many teachers tended to inculcate in us the official, racist explanation for our misery. And they encouraged an individualistic, competitive way out of this torment. We were told that the ultimate purpose of our education was to provide us with the skills and knowledge to lift ourselves singly and separately out of the muck and slime of poverty by 'our own bootstraps.'"

"It hurt to see us folding in on ourselves, using ourselves as whipping posts because we did not yet know how to struggle against the real cause of our misery."

"About the time I entered high school, the civil rights movement was beginning to awaken some Black Alabamians from their deep but fretful sleep."

"At fourteen, in my junior year, I felt restless and exceedingly limited. The provincialism of Birmingham bothered me, and I had not yet been swept up into the Civil Rights Movement to the extent that it could forge for me a solid raison d'etre. I could not define or articulate the dissatisfaction I felt. I simply had the sensation of things closing in on me - and I wanted to get out."

"What had seemed a personal hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern whites to confront their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks to acquiesce, became the inevitable consequences of a ruthless system which kept itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition and the oppression of one group by another. Profit was the word: the cold and constant motive for the behavior, the contempt and the despair I had seen."

"James Baldwin announced that he could not continue his lectures without contradicting his moral conscience and abdicating his political responsibilities."

"In this city of in its position of trying to recuperate from tourists and fleas - in this group of typically American students which without my presence would have been lily-white - my old familiar feelings of disorientation were rekindled."

"When the news broke in Paris that Kennedy had been shot, everyone rushed down to the U.S> Embassy... Nevertheless, I felt out of place at the Embassy, surrounded by crowds of 'Americans in Paris' and it was difficult to identify with their weeping. I wondered how many of them had she tears - or had truly felt saddened - when they read the Herald Tribune story about the murders of Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae and Denise."

"But each day it was becoming clearer to me that my ability to accomplish anything was directly dependent on my ability to contribute something concrete to the struggle."

"As in the United States, there was a natural inclination to identify the enemy as the white man. Natural because the great majority of white people, both in the United States and England, have been carriers of the racism which, in reality, benefits only a small number of them - the capitalists... When white people are indiscriminately viewed as the enemy, it is virtually impossible to develop a political solution."

"For me revolution was never an interim 'thing-to-do' before settling down; it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or new kind of social life - made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime."

"My overall vision of the school I directed was of a place where political understanding was forged and sharpened, where consciousness became explicit and was urged in a revolutionary direction."

"In this way he subtly criticized me for having romanticized something which was really nothing more than terribly hard work. It was then that I began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading."

"What he wanted to do was to point the finger at the real criminal: a society which keeps Black people imprisoned in such atrocious conditions of oppression that too often it is a question of stealing or going under."

"Jails are thoughtless places. Thoughtless in the sense that no thinking is done by the administration; no problem-solving or rational evaluation of any situation slightly different from the norm. The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules and the fear of establishing a precedent (meaning a rule they had not yet digested)."

"One small twist of fate and I might have drowned in the muck of poverty and disease and illiteracy. That is why I never felt I had the right to look upon myself as being any different from my sisters and brothers who did all the suffering, for all of us."

"Mrs. Hemphill's story was the universal story of the Black woman in a world that wants to see her crushed. Mrs. Hemphill had overcome. My mother had overcome. But many others had not. The system was pointed against us. That was what had come through so powerfully in Mrs. Hemphill's words. My own present predicament was, on a different level, evidence of that same politically, economically, socially hostile world which almost every Black women must contend with every day of her life."

"The more the movement for my freedom increased in numbers, strength, and confidence, the more imperative it became for everyone to see if not as something exceptional but as a small part of a great fight against injustice, one bough in a solidly rooted tree of resistance. It was not only political repression, but racism, poverty, police brutality, drugs, and all the myriad ways Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and white working people are kept chained to misery and despair. And it was not only within the United States of America, but in countries like Vietnam, with the bombs falling like rain from U.S. B52's, burning and dismembering innocent children."

"I sank deep into the moment, husbanding this delight, hoarding it. For I knew it would be short-lived. Work, Struggle. Confrontation lay before us like a rock-strewn road. We would walk it... But first the grass, the sun... and the people."

[quotes] How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee 2018

 

"And, of course, what was he thinking about? Which was a way of hoping he was thought about me."

"I can say that love and money are what most of my querents wanted to know about... It's the shadow on every kiss and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow. If there's a demon lurking when you read your cards, it is inside the querent when they ask about love or money. And it is inside you too, as you read."

"I felt shallow, but I was there because my father had always said, Whatever it is you want to do, find the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you."

"I was someone who didn't know how to find the path he was on, the one under his feet. This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers."

"You are only one of you, she said. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it's on Tunis or the trees outside your windows, is what matters. Don't worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible."

"Talent isn't enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they're dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I'm writing. Talent might give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent - promise, not product. I wanted to learn how to go from being the accident-at-the-beginning to being a writer, and I learned that from her."

"Go to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there."

"I found in it a pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically, we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled. To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have."

"He hollowed his desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never being alone, and being alone was when he got in trouble. And so be made sure he was never alone."

"Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just part my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was."

"I wasn't rich in here in New York, but if I stayed at the magazine, I knew I could get by. I could afford, for example, this meal I was having. I could make my way up the New York magazine-world ladder, a thought that instantly felt hollow."

"The lesson for me at least - and I think of as the gift of the garden, learned every year I lived in that apartment: you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined."

"I think writers are often terrifying to normal people - that is, to nonwriters in a capitalism system - for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time."

"I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. My longstanding love for singer Roland Gift, for example, came partly from finding out he was part Chinese. The same for the model Naomi Campbell. Unspoken in all of this was that I didn't feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity - any identity, really - was unreliable precisely because it was self-made."

"The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of using verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen."

"It is hard to be with someone in the closet, because you are never sure which version of the person you are with - the one who is hidden or the one trying to be free."

"I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this."

"I could see I had been very angry with her. A child's anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting her to guess my thoughts. The adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it."

"The therapist gave me an exercise. You can't get rid of the guardians who've kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them new jobs. The jobs they have, they've been doing since you were a child."

"You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world - and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the country it could become."

"What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?"

"Conservatism's oldest con is getting a voter to yell 'thief' at someone the thief chooses, the thief they voted for. And now we are in the final phase."

"Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine."

[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] 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 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] In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado 2019

 

"... and here you are learning that lesbian relationships are, somehow, different - more intense and beautiful but also more painful and volatile, because women are all of these things too."

"A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears. Windex is political. So is the incense you burn to hide the smell of sex, or a fight."

"Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliche of female queerness. No wonder we joke about U-Hauls on the second date. To find desire, love, everyday joy without men's accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise."

"Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal."

"You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief."

"You are not a parent; no one has ever told you that they hated you."

"This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?"

"Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest."

"You did not believe that this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency."

"Donald Trump was elected president. People cried at the dinner table."

"I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn't mean you can't be common, common as fucking dirt."

"That there's a real ending to anything is, I'm pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go."

[quotes] The Slum Dreamer - Wilfred Mwangi 2013

 

"I had not sought these expectations but I had always fulfilled them."

"This culture of sharing was very interesting to me because in the urban town where I lived with my dad, this never happened. If you ran out of an ingredient, you had to go buy it or do without it. Nobody would even think to borrow salt from their neighbor."

"So out of necessity, portions in Kibera are just large enough to get you through the immediate moment of need, for the next moment is not guaranteed... In Kibera you buy a cube of cooking fat just enough for whatever meal you are making at that particular moment for nobody knows what the next meal would be or what it will bring with it. In the townships, French fries are portioned by the plate, but in Kibera you buy French fries by the teaspoon; just enough to trick your taste buds after months of salivating."

"The joke around our family was that my dad had the greatest ideas until he actually got the means to implement them, at which point they magically disappeared."

"For the first time now, I understand that the people living in Kibera are not losers as I had always thought of them. They are the people courageous enough to face indignation in an effort to keep their hopes of a better life alive. Kibera offers them the only real chance of living in Niarobi where all the jobs are, and while they could go back to their rural areas and not have to shit in plastic bags or pee on their door steps, they have chosen instead not to give up on their dreams and have taken a slap from Kibera smack in the face, but still keep going."

"So Kibera was really where people with nothing but hope and the audacity to do what it takes moved to keep their dreams alive."

"I will finally join the all those people waking up early in the morning to begin the long walk from Kibera to their various work places. I too have a job to go to. I too have something to walk for. It is not much, but it is everything. It is also a starting point. I will pour my heart and blood into it. I will cherish it and treasure it, because it is a job that will afford me the privilege of continuing my stay in Kibera,"

"Kibera had first shocked me, then welcomed me, toughened me, seasoned me, opened my eyes to a world beyond my imagination, chewed me, and finally threatened to take my will and desire to live again, to swallow me. With its stinking air that I had twitched my nose to and its infested waters that had given me bilharzias, I had come to rely on Kibera to live, just one day at a time, one moment at a time, penny after penny. I had learned to appreciate the now."

[quotes] Born a Crime - Trevor Noah 2016

 

"In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid."

"That's how a police state works - everyone thinks everyone else is the police."

"... he didn't apologize for being racist; he merely apologized for aiming his racism at us."

"Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up from zero."

"The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don't want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money."

"If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet - tweets, Facebook posts, lists - you've read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you've read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that's what hustling was. It's maximal effort put into minimal gain."

"My cry was not a cry of sadness. It was not catharsis. It wasn't me feeling sorry for myself. It was an expression of raw pain that came from an inability of my body to express that pain in any other way, shape, or form."

[quotes] Becoming - Michelle Obama 2018

 

"Even if we didn't know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance."

"I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go."

"Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It's vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear."

"Hearing them, I realized that they weren't at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different."

"It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck."

"In Chicago, we'd made the mistake of putting all our hopes for reform on the shoulders of one person without building the political apparatus to support his vision."

"I'd seen just how a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective."

"If you don't get out there and define yourself, you'll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others."

"All we could do then was put our faith into the effort, trusting that with sun and rain and time, something half-decent would push up through the dirt."

"Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient."

"As he saw it, it was part of his responsibility, what he'd been elected to do - to look rather than look away, to stay upright when the rest of us felt ready to fall down."

"You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be."

"'being president doesn't change who you are; it reveals who you are.'"

"There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there's grace in willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become."

[quotes] Passionate Nomad, The Life of Freya Stark - Jane Fletcher Geniesse 1999

 

"No crime short of murder... can be comparable to the crime of destroying in another the capacity to love: and this happens sometimes through the rashness of parents... but more often through some bitterness of experience when youth is still defenseless."

"I cannot help believing that if she had wanted life more, she could have held it: but she was not interested, and accepted death as she had accepted her marriage and her baptism, and no one outside her could help."

"I hope I shall not become so, resenting ideas that are not my ideas, and seeing the world with all its changes and growth as a series of congealed formulas."

"I never imagined that my first sight of the desert would come with such a shock of beauty and enslave me right away."

"But anything was possible, Freya was now allowing herself to believe, if she could only detach herself from the tender shackles that had kept her bound to home for so long."

"It came I think from a feeling which influences me greatly, whose beginning I cannot remember and whose origin I cannot trace - a feeling for the value of affection in itself, and a reluctance to waste any of it that happened to come my way."

"Freya was burnishing her new persona, burying the shy girl of her youth and creating a self-sufficiency to match her growing reputation as a person of fearless, even heroic, deeds."

"How brittle in reality are all the things whose permanence is never questioned."

"Freya, the chronic nomad, liked the thought of Venetia's stable life, while Venetia enjoyed the open horizons of Freya's."

"It is ridiculous to care so much, but after all there is less difference between us and a lizard than between us and God and we expect Him to feel an interest."

"Bribing people to adjust their beliefs was both cynical and repugnant."

"After Flora's death she used the writing to understand their complicated relationship and came to a forgiveness and reconciliation she could not have achieved had Flora been alive."

"... and the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows."

"Perseverance is often praised, but it is not so often realized that another quality must accompany it to make it of any value - and that is elasticity; perseverance in only one direction very often fails: but if one is ready to take whatever road is offered, and to change the chosen way, if circumstances change, and yet to keep the end in view - then success is infinitely more probable."

"And it hardly made sense, she insisted, to make Palestinians pay with their homes and lands for injuries done to Jews by European Christians."

[quotes] The Story of My Experiments with Truth - Mohandas K. Gandhi autobiography 1948

 

"Her duty was easily converted into my right to exact faithfulness from her, and if it had to be exacted, I should be watchfully tenacious of the right."

"I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education. I tried later to improve mine, but it was too late."

"True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world. Only between like natures can friendship be altogether worthy and enduring."

"... the change harmonized my inward and outward life. It was also more in keeping with the means of my family. My life was certainly more truthful and my soul knew no bounds of joy."

 "So long as we are children we are attracted by toys, and the Tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets. That may be claimed to be the purpose served by the Eiffel Tower."

"The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial - only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice... Redress for wrongs I should seek only to the extent that would be necessary for the removal of the colour prejudice."

"Was this the meaning of Christianity? Did they cease to be Indians because they had become Christians?"

"I should not exhaust my skill as a fighter in insisting on retaining my turban. It was worthy of a better cause."

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings."

"It is only the English-speaking ones who will not learn it, as though knowledge of English were an obstacle to learning our own languages."

"Such service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes the spirit."

"A patriot cannot afford to ignore any branch of service to the motherland."

"A public institution means an institution conducted with the approval, and from the funds, of the public. When such an institution ceases to have public support, it forfeits the right to exist. Institutions maintained on permanent funds are often found to ignore public opinion, and are frequently responsible to acts contrary to it."

"It is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not society, from which he should except nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and even mortal persecution."

"The deeper the search in the mine of truth the richer the discovery of the gems buried there, in the shape of openings for an ever greater variety of service."

"I believed then and I believe even now, that, no matter what amount of work one has, one should always find some time for exercise, just as one does for one's meals... far from taking away from one's capacity for work, it adds to it."

"A writer almost always presents one aspect of a case, whereas every case can be seen from no less than seven points of view, all of which are probably correct by themselves, but not correct at the same time and in the same circumstances."

"The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy."

"It is a rare thing in this world to be born as a human being, and I would far rather die in your arms than pollute my body with such abominations."

"... even truthfulness in the practice of the profession cannot cure it of the fundamental defect that vitiates it."

"I had seen packets of indigo, but little dreamed that it was grown and manufactured in Champaran at great hardship to thousands of agriculturists."

"My coworkers and I had built many castles in the air, but they all vanished for the time being."

"... whose desperate struggle for bread renders them insensible to all feelings of decency and self-respect. And our philanthropists, instead of providing work for them and insisting on their working for bread, give them alms."

"Civility does not here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good."

"The lesson was indelibly imprinted on the public mind that the salvation of the people depends upon themselves, upon their capacity for suffering and sacrifice."

"What a tragedy that the language of the country should be taboo in meetings held in the country, for work relating to the country, and that a speech there in Hindustani by a stray individual like myself should be a matter for congratulations!"

"It was one interwoven with my course of life which is guided by principles no longer depending upon outside authority."

"To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself."

"That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means."

"In bidding farewell to the reader... I ask him to join with me in prayer to the God of Truth that He may grant me the boon of Ahimsa in mind, word and deed."

[quotes] The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. - Ed. Clayborne Carson 1998

"I have never experienced the feeling of not having the basic necessities of life. These things were always provided by a father who always put his family first."

"But this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type."

"I would end up having to go to the back of that bus with my body, but every time I got on that bus I left my mind up on the front seat. And I said to myself, 'One of these days I'm going to put my body up there where my mind is."

"It is my conviction that the minister must somehow take profound theological and philosophical views and place them in a concrete framework. I must forever make the complex the simple."

"Above all, I see the preaching ministry as a dual process. On the one hand I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will have a change."

"...the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their right with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."

"And as I watched them I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity."

"I soon saw that I was the victim of an unwarranted pessimism because I had started out with an unwarranted optimism."

"Those who had previously trembled before the law were now proud to be arrested for the cause of freedom."

"What the opposition failed to see was that our mutual suffering had wrapped us all in a single garment of destiny. What happened to one happened to all."

"Often the path to freedom will carry you through prison."

"The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor."

"Our ultimate aim was not to defeat or humiliate the white man but to win his friendship and understanding. We had a moral obligation to remind him that segregation is wrong. We protested with the ultimate aim of being reconciled with our white brothers."

"But I had to look at something else beyond the man - the people who surrounded him - and I felt that Kennedy was surrounded by better people. It was on that basis that I felt that Kennedy would make the best president."

"The people of Albany had straightened their backs, and, as Gandhi had said, no one can ride on the back of a man unless it is bent."

"The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people."

"There comes a time in the atmosphere of leadership when a man surrounded by loyal friends and allies realizes he has come face-to-face with himself and with ruthless reality. I was along in that crowded room."

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

"...one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"

"I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends."

"A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institution is a revolution."

"American political thought was not committed to conservatism, nor radicalism, nor moderation. It was above all fluid. As such it contained trends rather than hard lines, and affirmative leadership could guide it into constructive channels."

"Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart."

"But then I realized that this was no mere recognition of the contribution of one man on the stage of history. It was a testimony to the magnificent drama of the civil rights movement and the thousands of actors who had played their roles extremely well. In truth, it is these 'noble' people who had won this Novel Prize."

"Racial justice around the world. Poverty. War. When man solves these three great problems he will have squared his moral progress with his scientific progress. And, more importantly, he will had learned the practical art of living in harmony."

"Cities that had been citadels of the status quo became the unwilling birthplace of significant national legislation. Montgomery led to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960; Birmingham inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and Selma produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

"When all is finally entered into the annals of sociology; when philosophers, politicians, and preachers have all had their say, we must return to the fact that a person participates in this society primarily as an economic entity. At rock bottom we are neither poets, athletes, nor artists; our existence is centered in the fact that we are consumers, because we first must eat and have shelter to life."

"I should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness."

"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."

"I refuse to determine what is right by taking a Gallup poll of the trends of the time. I imagine that there were leaders in Germany who sincerely opposed what Hitler was doing to the Jews. But they took their poll and discovered that anti-Semitism was the prevailing trend. In order to 'be in step with the times,' in order to 'keep in touch,' they yielded to one of the most ignominious evils that history has ever known."

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triples of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

"On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' And Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But Conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, not politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right."

"If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he's traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, it I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not be in vain."

[quotes] I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou 1969

 

"It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or leaning."

"Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood."

"but I knew I was as clearly imprisoned behind the scene as the actors outside were confirmed to their roles."

"It was simply a small pattern in the grand design of our lives. If other children didn't move so much, it just went to show that our lives were fated to be different from everyone else's in the world."

"I probably hoped that after I had heard all the sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep in my ears, the world would be quiet around me."

"That was a totally new idea to me, and I would need time to think about it."

"She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations."

"For a few seconds it was a tossup over whether I would laugh (imagine being named Hallelujah) or cry (imagine letting some white woman rename you for her convenience)."

"Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."

"I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed."

"Anyone I reckoned, sufficiently afraid or sufficiently dull could be polite. But to be able to operate at a top level with both adults and children was admirable."

"so which concrete angel glued to what country seat had decided that if my brother wanted to become a lawyer he had to first pay penance for his skin"

"We were maids and farmers, handymen and washer-women, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."

"As a species, we were an abomination. All of us."

"'I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty of give me death."

"'Annie, my policy is I'd rather stick my hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's.'"

"When the spell wore off he asked Uncle Willie what colored people had done to white people in the first place."

"Through food we learned that there were other people in the world."

"Each day she faced us with a clean slate and acted as if ours were clean as well."

"Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective."

"With the optimism of ignorance I thought that the morning was bound to bring a more pleasant solution."

"I reasoned that I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss."

"But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind."

"'That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, "Can't Do is like Don't Care." Neither of them have a home.'"

"I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer."

"Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of."

"Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with superior forces of maturity."

"But it's mean to watch someone enjoy something and not show your understanding of their enjoyment."