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SHAPING OUR OWN FUTURES
Food for Thought
...precisely at the point when you begin to develop a
conscience, you must find yourself in conflict with your
society. It is your responsibility to change society
if you think of yourself as an educated person.
- James Baldwin, American Writer
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out exactly what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those who they oppress.
- Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist
I have to cast my lot with those who age after age,
with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
- Adrienne Rich, American Poet
Reasonable men and women adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable men and women seek to change it. Therefore all depends upon those who are willing to strive for the unreasonable.
- George Bernard Shaw, Irish Writer
We have it in our power to begin the world again.
- Thomas Paine, American Revolutionary
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has
direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon
the changes we hope to bring about through those lives.
- Audre Lorde, American Writer
We have collectively created the death cults. We can collectively create a culture of life. But to do so, we must be willing to step out of line, to forgo the comfort of leaving decisions up to somebody else... to guide our own lives, commit ourselves, our time, our work, our energy, to act in the service of life.
- Starhawk, American Writer
Capitalism and communism are both imperialisms that provide
only half answers. They make the human being an object ...
We want something besides capitalism or communism,
something on the order of self-management and sharing.
- Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Argentine Nobel Laureate
Justice can be realized whenever those who are not
injured by injustice are as outraged as those who are.
- Earl Warren, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice
History teaches us...that it is not the rebels, it is not the curious, it is not the dissidents who endanger society but rather the accepting, the unthinking, the unquestioning, the docile, the obedient, the silent and the indifferent. The time to be concerned about liberty is not when people are out in the streets protesting and demonstrating but when they are not. The time to be alarmed about a great university is not when its students are exercising publicly their freedom of _expression but when they are quiet, when they despair of changing society.
- Leon Litwak, American Historian
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world. Indeed
it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist
I can understand pessimism (about change), but I don't believe
in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical
evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, but just enough to fire
hope, because for hope we don't need certainty, only possibility
- Howard Zinn, American Historian
The decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes...Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind...the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language...If one gets rid of these habits (of bad language) one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.
- George Orwell, British Socialist/Writer
The need for profound human change emerges not only as an ethical or religious demand, not only as a psychological demand arising from the pathogenic nature of our present social character, but also as a condition for the sheer survival of the human race...For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. However, a change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic and social changes occur that give the human heart the chance for change and the courage and vision to achieve it.
- Erich Fromm, German Psychologist
Down the road, it is possible to visualize a kind of social science that would be very different from the one most of us have been practicing: a moral-social science where moral considerations are not repressed or kept apart, but are systematically commingled with analytic argument, without guilt feelings over any lack of integration; where the transition from preaching to proving and back again is performed frequently and with ease; and where moral considerations need no longer be smuggled in surreptitiously, nor expressed unconsciously, but are displayed openly and disarmingly.
- Albert Hirschman, American Economist
If you're not part of the solution,
you're part of the problem.
- Eldridge Cleaver, American Black Power Activist
We are in a world in which we must choose between being a
victim or an executioner--and nothing else. Such a choice
is not easy. It always seemed to me that in fact there were
no executioners--only victims. In the last analysis,
of course. But this is a truth that is not widely known.
- Albert Camus, French Writer
In any society, the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about how a society works. Very often, therefore, truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like postures rather than objective statements...For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victor's claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his (sic) working equipment.
- Barrington Moore, American Sociologist
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not that clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run...the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.
- Howard Zinn, American Historian
And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. 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. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it--hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.
- Audre Lorde, American Writer
To lose the future means to lose the past as well, to give up on history. It is to repress the sense of death and life alike, for both death and life can only be experienced as part of a continuum of existence. It is to retreat to the narrowest sliver of the present, and to guard one's interest there in a self-centred manner. Yet we do not succeed in living fully in the present either--because the only present in which we can live fully is a present into which all existence has been compressed. And so when we lose the future, we lose the present as well.
- Joel Kovel, American Psychologist
The naming of the intolerable is itself the hope. When something is intolerable, action must follow, subject to all the vissicitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar--from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inevitable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively the present.
- John Berger, British Writer
I may have thought the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that such a world is possible, and that it is worthwhile to live with a view to bringing it nearer. I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.
- Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher/Nobel Laureate
Either we have hope within us or we don't; it's a dimension
of the soul... Hope in this deep and powerful sense is...
an ability to work for something because it is good not
just because it stands a chance to succeed... It is
also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength
to live and continually to try new things, even in
conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do here and now.
- Vaclav Havel, Czech Playwright/President
I know only two things for certain. One is that we gain
nothing by walking around the difficulties (of life) and
merely indulging in wishful thinking. The other is that
there is always something one can do. In the modest form,
this means to study, to try to sort out different proposals,
and weigh the effect of proposed solutions. Otherwise, there
would be nothing left but to give up. And it is not worthy
of human beings to give up... The greatness of being human...
lies in not giving up, in not accepting one's own limitations.
Alva Myrdal, Swedish Nobel Laureate
The world of politics is always twenty
years behind the world of thought.
- John Jay Chapman, American Writer
There is time for everything if you're
not sucked into the wheels of history.
- J.M. Coetzee, South African Writer
The best way to encourage others to follow your lead
is to do what you hope they might dare to do themselves.
- Confucius, Chinese Philosopher
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the
same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Albert Einstein, American Scientist
So never be afraid, never be afraid to raise your voice for
honesty and truth and compassion; against injustice, lying
and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in
all the other thousands of rooms like this one today and
tomorrow and next week will do this, not as a class or classes,
but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
- William Faulkner, American Writer
It requires more than personal experience to gain a philosophy
or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of
our response and our capacity to enter into the lives of others
that help us make their lives and experiences our own.
- Emma Goldman, American Anarchist/Feminist
Nothing worth working for can be completely achieved in our
lifetimes; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which
is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any
immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by
faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished
alone; therefore we are saved by love.
Reinhold Niebuhr, American Theologian
The world needs more men and women who do not have a price at
which they can be bought; who do not borrow from integrity to
play for expediency; whose handshake is an ironclad contract;
who are not afraid of risk; who are honest in small matters as
they are in large ones; who know how to win with grace and lose
with dignity; who do not believe that shrewdness and cunning and
ruthlessness are the three keys to success; who still have friends
they made twenty years ago; who are not afraid to go against
the grain of popular opinion, and do not believe in consensus;
who are sometimes wrong and always willing to admit it.
- Anonymous
Gandhi was not endowed with any unusual artistic, scholarly
or scientific talents. He never earned a degree or received any
special academic honors. He was never a candidate in an election
or a holder of public office. Yet when he died, in 1948, at the
age of seventy-eight, practically the whole world mourned him.
- Ved Mehta, Indian Writer
Small is the number of people who see with their own eyes
and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein, American Scientist
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for
the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide
you'll ever have. If you cannot hear it, you will all of your life
spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.
- Howard Thurman, President, Spelman College
As human beings our greatness lies not so much in being able to
remake the world, as in being able to remake ourselves.
- Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Activist
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my
sparks should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should
be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow than a sleepy and
permanent planet. The proper function of humans is to
live, not merely to exist. I shall not waste my days in
trying to prolong them. I shall use my time relentlessly.
- Jack London, American Socialist/Writer
It is so important to understand that one of the primary means
of immobilizing the American people politically today is to
hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be
believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance,
that is. And the American people are more than willing to
be held in this state because to KNOW the truth--as opposed
to only BELIEVE the truth--is to face an awful terror and
to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely
in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves
from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness
and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being
empowered and confident in one's rational powers.
Martin Schotz, American Educator
It is better to vote for what you want and not get it,
than to vote for what you don't want and end up with it.
- Eugene Debs, American Socialist
The true patriot is one who gives his/her highest loyalty not to
his/her country as it is but to what it can and ought to be.
- Albert Camus, French Writer
Imagination is the beginning of creation: you
imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine;
and at last you create what you've willed.
- George Bernard Shaw, Irish Writer/Playwright
We have learned that our dreams are important not because they come
true but because they take us to places we never would have otherwise gone, and teach us what we never knew was there to learn.
- Michael Ventura, American Journalist/Writer
The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, German Poet
If you want to really learn;
be careful what you're taught.
- Jacob Ravenstein, Israeli Educator
Seize this very minute: What can you do, or dream you
can do. Begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
- Johan Goethe, German Poet/Playwright
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein, American Scientist
Nothing great is accomplished without passion.
- Frederick Nietzsche, German Philosopher
The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually
lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's
family, friends, or lovers--to say nothing of one's children--
to live according to the world's definitions. One must find a
way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
- James Baldwin, American Writer
Until people begin to really hate ugliness and poverty and
disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and the sick, we
shall not have, I fear, any great social advance.
- Randolph Bourne, American Writer
The only thing necessary for the triumph of stupidity
is for good people to go along with it.
- Edmund Burke, British Philosopher
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, it's important to
say that the true revolutionary is moved by feelings
of love. It is impossible to conceive of an
authentic revolutionary who lacks this quality.
- Che Guevara, Argentine Physician/Revolutionary
How many of you are taking courses you don't really want in
preparation for leading lives you don't really want to live?
Aren't you adapting to a cruel economy which stunts your
potential and distorts your life? Don't give in!
- Michael Harrington, American Socialist/Writer
If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness, then it is
obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their
large share of responsibility for the world, and hiding their
distaste for politics under an alleged need to be objective. The
intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to
the misery of the world, should be provocative by being
independent, should rebel against all hidden manipulations,
and should be the chief doubters of power and its incantations.
- Vaclav Havel, Czech Playwright/President
I strive to discover how to signal my companions... to
say in time a simple word, a password, like conspirators:
Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge
our hearts, let us create for Earth a brain and a heart,
let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle.
- Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek Writer
If you want to make frozen circumstances dance,
you have to sing to them in their own music.
- Karl Marx, German Philosopher
What do the circumstances of life matter if your
dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?
- Somerset Maugham, British Writer
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the
idealist fighting for peace... most easily succumbs: activism
and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form,
perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow
oneself to be carried away by the multitude of conflicting
concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to
succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one's work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful.
- Thomas Merton, American Theologian
The details of a new order of life cannot be known to us. We must
shape them ourselves. Life consists solely of searching for the
unknown and of harmonizing our actions with the new truth.
- Leo Tolstoy, Russian Writer/Philosopher
Reevaluate everything you have been told...
challenge what insults your soul.
- Walt Whitman, American Writer
A nation that cannot get angry at its official betrayers
has lost a resource more important than any other.
- Garry Wills, American Writer
The same modern American civilization that has given us unjust
laws has given us great ideals. We need to learn how to violate
these laws in such a way as to realize those ideals.
- Howard Zinn, American Historian
The human utopia... a united humankind living in solidarity and
peace, free from economic determination and from war and class
struggle-- can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy,
intelligence, and enthusiasm on realizing the human Utopia
as we have spent on realizing our technical Utopias.
- Erich Fromm, German Psychologist
When education is no longer utopian... it is either because
the future has no meaning for humans, or because humans are
afraid to risk living the future as a creative overcoming
of a present that has become extremely old.
- Paolo Freire, Brazilian Educator
Think about the kind of world you would want to
live in. What do you need to build that world? Demand
that your teachers teach you that.
Peter Kropotkin, Russian Anarchist/Writer
We have to learn to think in a new way... Shall we put
an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?
... Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
- Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher and
Albert Einstein, American Scientist
I am more interested in educating critical and self-
reflective men and women, with commitments to values,
than I am in equipping them with certain competencies,
skills, even certain kinds of information. It is the
way of being in the world and engaging with the world
that is important. The danger lies in people
becoming accommodated to the idea of an objectively
existent reality, defined by others, usually official
others, and taking that reality for granted.
- Maxine Greene, American Educator
It is organized violence on top which creates
individual violence at the bottom.
- Emma Goldman, American Anarchist/Feminist
Schools are machines for forcing spurious learning on children in
order that universities may stamp them as educated men and women when they have finally lost all power to think for themselves.
- George Bernard Shaw, Irish Writer/Playwright
But in a free country you cannot fool all of the people
all of the time. Some of them will have a talent for
fooling themselves, and they will insist on exercising it.
- Aubrey Menen, French Writer
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamoring to be led to safety) by
menacing it with an endless series of imaginery hobgoblins.
- H.L. Mencken, American Journalist
American political history is far too criminal a
subject to be a fit thing to teach young people.
- W.H. Auden, American Poet
Social violence lies not so much in the use of
bayonets but in what the bayonets protect.
- Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Activist
Men murdered themselves into this (U.S.) democracy.
- D.H. Lawrence, British Writer
Any prosecutor can convict a guilty man.
A great prosecutor can even convict an innocent man.
- Anonymous, Thin Blue Line
To kill one person is murder.
To kill thousands is foreign policy.
Moh-Tze, Chinese Writer
Americans are so demoralized and self-degraded, you could throw
them into a stewpot, and they'd stand up and salt themselves.
- Gary Indiana, American Journalist
Opinion polling was born out of a struggle not to
discover the public mind, but rather to shape it.
- Christopher Hitchens, American Journalist
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.
- Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. President
All oppression creates a state of war.
- Simone de Beauvoir, French Writer/Feminist
In our country people are rarely imprisoned for their ideas
because we are already imprisoned by our ideas.
- Marcus Garvey, American/Jamaican Activist
Poverty is the worse form of violence.
- Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Activist
It is sometimes said that war is a natural condition of man. As a military man, I do not believe it. I do believe breathing, eating, loving, caring, are natural conditions of man. People don't make war, governments do. And our governments appear willing to accept war, even nuclear war, as a natural event.
- Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque, U.S. Navy, Retired
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent
the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to
make the world safe for children to grow up in.
- Ursula LeGuin, American Writer
The streets are starting to become the private preserve of
the police; arbitrary police decisions have the force of law:
move along, keep moving, don't talk, don't give anyone what
you've written no gatherings. Prison begins far away from
the prison gates: just outside the door of your home.
- Michel Foucault, French Philosopher
We don't want justice
We don't want freedom
All we want
Is someone to love
- David Byrne, American Musician
Our government is the potent, omnipotent teacher. For good or ill,
it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law
- Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Getting tough: The only mode of conduct that makes an impression
on people who have lost all respect for human decency.
- Louis Lapham, American Writer/Editor
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
- Learned Hand, American Jurist
Loose talk about war against crime too easily infuses the administration of justice with the psychology and morals of war...the process of waging war, no matter how it is
rationalized, is a process of moral deterioration.
- Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where
ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel
that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob,
and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
- Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist
Imagine a mass of cancerous tissue, the cells of which enjoyed consciousness. Would they not be full of self-congratulatory sentiments at their independence, their more advanced level of development, their rapid rate of growth? Would they not sneer at their more primitive cousins who were bound into a static and unfree existence, with limited aspirations, subject to heavy group constraint, and obviously "going nowhere"? Would they not rejoice in their control over their own destiny, and cheer the conversion of more and more normal cells as convincing proof of the validity of their own way of life? Would they not, in fact, feel increasingly triumphant right up to the moment the organism on which they fed expired?
- Philip Slater, American Psychologist
Institutions, and especially economic institutions, have a profound influence in moulding the characters of men and women. They may encourage adventure and hope, or timidity and the pursuit of safety. They may open people's minds to great possibilities or close them against everything but the risk of obscure misfortune. They may make a man's happiness depend on what he (sic) adds to the general possessions of the world, or upon what he can secure for himself of the private goods in which others cannot share. Modern capitalism forces the wrong decision of these alternatives upon all who are not heroic or exceptionally lucky.
- Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher/Nobel Laureate
In the 17th century, we could have written of the comic illusion. In our day the illusion has become tragic. It is political. People in our time, with even greater zeal than in the 19th century, invest political affairs with their passions and hopes, but live in a peculiarly distressing political trance. Despite past experiences we have not attained a realistic view of our situation, and the interference of myths constantly frustrates political impulses and renders our thoughts out-of-date. To be sure, circumstances have made us question yesterday's political certainties; we are now aware of the tenuous nature of public opinion even if strongly affirmed in some glorious plebiscite; we know that the sovereignty of the people is an etiological myth without possible realization; we know that the popular vote is not an effective process for controlling or passing judgments on the regime, or an effective means of arbitration in the struggle between opposed political
and social forces, nor a process suited to select the ablest leaders. Although the events of the 20th century have made it
clear that the political notions treasured as truths in the
19th century are but faded myths for us, the majority
of our fellow citizens still live by them.
- Jacques Ellul, French Philosopher/Writer
A people or class which is cut off from its own past is
far less free to choose and to act as a people or class
than one that has been able to situate itself in history.
- John Berger, English Writer
__________________
THE BRIDGE OF TRUTH SHALL NEVER FALL AGAIN
Food for Thought
...precisely at the point when you begin to develop a
conscience, you must find yourself in conflict with your
society. It is your responsibility to change society
if you think of yourself as an educated person.
- James Baldwin, American Writer
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out exactly what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those who they oppress.
- Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist
I have to cast my lot with those who age after age,
with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
- Adrienne Rich, American Poet
Reasonable men and women adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable men and women seek to change it. Therefore all depends upon those who are willing to strive for the unreasonable.
- George Bernard Shaw, Irish Writer
We have it in our power to begin the world again.
- Thomas Paine, American Revolutionary
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has
direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon
the changes we hope to bring about through those lives.
- Audre Lorde, American Writer
We have collectively created the death cults. We can collectively create a culture of life. But to do so, we must be willing to step out of line, to forgo the comfort of leaving decisions up to somebody else... to guide our own lives, commit ourselves, our time, our work, our energy, to act in the service of life.
- Starhawk, American Writer
Capitalism and communism are both imperialisms that provide
only half answers. They make the human being an object ...
We want something besides capitalism or communism,
something on the order of self-management and sharing.
- Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Argentine Nobel Laureate
Justice can be realized whenever those who are not
injured by injustice are as outraged as those who are.
- Earl Warren, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice
History teaches us...that it is not the rebels, it is not the curious, it is not the dissidents who endanger society but rather the accepting, the unthinking, the unquestioning, the docile, the obedient, the silent and the indifferent. The time to be concerned about liberty is not when people are out in the streets protesting and demonstrating but when they are not. The time to be alarmed about a great university is not when its students are exercising publicly their freedom of _expression but when they are quiet, when they despair of changing society.
- Leon Litwak, American Historian
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world. Indeed
it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist
I can understand pessimism (about change), but I don't believe
in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical
evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, but just enough to fire
hope, because for hope we don't need certainty, only possibility
- Howard Zinn, American Historian
The decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes...Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind...the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language...If one gets rid of these habits (of bad language) one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.
- George Orwell, British Socialist/Writer
The need for profound human change emerges not only as an ethical or religious demand, not only as a psychological demand arising from the pathogenic nature of our present social character, but also as a condition for the sheer survival of the human race...For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. However, a change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic and social changes occur that give the human heart the chance for change and the courage and vision to achieve it.
- Erich Fromm, German Psychologist
Down the road, it is possible to visualize a kind of social science that would be very different from the one most of us have been practicing: a moral-social science where moral considerations are not repressed or kept apart, but are systematically commingled with analytic argument, without guilt feelings over any lack of integration; where the transition from preaching to proving and back again is performed frequently and with ease; and where moral considerations need no longer be smuggled in surreptitiously, nor expressed unconsciously, but are displayed openly and disarmingly.
- Albert Hirschman, American Economist
If you're not part of the solution,
you're part of the problem.
- Eldridge Cleaver, American Black Power Activist
We are in a world in which we must choose between being a
victim or an executioner--and nothing else. Such a choice
is not easy. It always seemed to me that in fact there were
no executioners--only victims. In the last analysis,
of course. But this is a truth that is not widely known.
- Albert Camus, French Writer
In any society, the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about how a society works. Very often, therefore, truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like postures rather than objective statements...For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victor's claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his (sic) working equipment.
- Barrington Moore, American Sociologist
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not that clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run...the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.
- Howard Zinn, American Historian
And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. 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. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it--hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.
- Audre Lorde, American Writer
To lose the future means to lose the past as well, to give up on history. It is to repress the sense of death and life alike, for both death and life can only be experienced as part of a continuum of existence. It is to retreat to the narrowest sliver of the present, and to guard one's interest there in a self-centred manner. Yet we do not succeed in living fully in the present either--because the only present in which we can live fully is a present into which all existence has been compressed. And so when we lose the future, we lose the present as well.
- Joel Kovel, American Psychologist
The naming of the intolerable is itself the hope. When something is intolerable, action must follow, subject to all the vissicitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar--from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inevitable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively the present.
- John Berger, British Writer
I may have thought the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that such a world is possible, and that it is worthwhile to live with a view to bringing it nearer. I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.
- Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher/Nobel Laureate
Either we have hope within us or we don't; it's a dimension
of the soul... Hope in this deep and powerful sense is...
an ability to work for something because it is good not
just because it stands a chance to succeed... It is
also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength
to live and continually to try new things, even in
conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do here and now.
- Vaclav Havel, Czech Playwright/President
I know only two things for certain. One is that we gain
nothing by walking around the difficulties (of life) and
merely indulging in wishful thinking. The other is that
there is always something one can do. In the modest form,
this means to study, to try to sort out different proposals,
and weigh the effect of proposed solutions. Otherwise, there
would be nothing left but to give up. And it is not worthy
of human beings to give up... The greatness of being human...
lies in not giving up, in not accepting one's own limitations.
Alva Myrdal, Swedish Nobel Laureate
The world of politics is always twenty
years behind the world of thought.
- John Jay Chapman, American Writer
There is time for everything if you're
not sucked into the wheels of history.
- J.M. Coetzee, South African Writer
The best way to encourage others to follow your lead
is to do what you hope they might dare to do themselves.
- Confucius, Chinese Philosopher
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the
same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Albert Einstein, American Scientist
So never be afraid, never be afraid to raise your voice for
honesty and truth and compassion; against injustice, lying
and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in
all the other thousands of rooms like this one today and
tomorrow and next week will do this, not as a class or classes,
but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
- William Faulkner, American Writer
It requires more than personal experience to gain a philosophy
or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of
our response and our capacity to enter into the lives of others
that help us make their lives and experiences our own.
- Emma Goldman, American Anarchist/Feminist
Nothing worth working for can be completely achieved in our
lifetimes; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which
is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any
immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by
faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished
alone; therefore we are saved by love.
Reinhold Niebuhr, American Theologian
The world needs more men and women who do not have a price at
which they can be bought; who do not borrow from integrity to
play for expediency; whose handshake is an ironclad contract;
who are not afraid of risk; who are honest in small matters as
they are in large ones; who know how to win with grace and lose
with dignity; who do not believe that shrewdness and cunning and
ruthlessness are the three keys to success; who still have friends
they made twenty years ago; who are not afraid to go against
the grain of popular opinion, and do not believe in consensus;
who are sometimes wrong and always willing to admit it.
- Anonymous
Gandhi was not endowed with any unusual artistic, scholarly
or scientific talents. He never earned a degree or received any
special academic honors. He was never a candidate in an election
or a holder of public office. Yet when he died, in 1948, at the
age of seventy-eight, practically the whole world mourned him.
- Ved Mehta, Indian Writer
Small is the number of people who see with their own eyes
and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein, American Scientist
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for
the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide
you'll ever have. If you cannot hear it, you will all of your life
spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.
- Howard Thurman, President, Spelman College
As human beings our greatness lies not so much in being able to
remake the world, as in being able to remake ourselves.
- Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Activist
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my
sparks should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should
be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow than a sleepy and
permanent planet. The proper function of humans is to
live, not merely to exist. I shall not waste my days in
trying to prolong them. I shall use my time relentlessly.
- Jack London, American Socialist/Writer
It is so important to understand that one of the primary means
of immobilizing the American people politically today is to
hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be
believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance,
that is. And the American people are more than willing to
be held in this state because to KNOW the truth--as opposed
to only BELIEVE the truth--is to face an awful terror and
to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely
in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves
from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness
and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being
empowered and confident in one's rational powers.
Martin Schotz, American Educator
It is better to vote for what you want and not get it,
than to vote for what you don't want and end up with it.
- Eugene Debs, American Socialist
The true patriot is one who gives his/her highest loyalty not to
his/her country as it is but to what it can and ought to be.
- Albert Camus, French Writer
Imagination is the beginning of creation: you
imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine;
and at last you create what you've willed.
- George Bernard Shaw, Irish Writer/Playwright
We have learned that our dreams are important not because they come
true but because they take us to places we never would have otherwise gone, and teach us what we never knew was there to learn.
- Michael Ventura, American Journalist/Writer
The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, German Poet
If you want to really learn;
be careful what you're taught.
- Jacob Ravenstein, Israeli Educator
Seize this very minute: What can you do, or dream you
can do. Begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
- Johan Goethe, German Poet/Playwright
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein, American Scientist
Nothing great is accomplished without passion.
- Frederick Nietzsche, German Philosopher
The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually
lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's
family, friends, or lovers--to say nothing of one's children--
to live according to the world's definitions. One must find a
way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
- James Baldwin, American Writer
Until people begin to really hate ugliness and poverty and
disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and the sick, we
shall not have, I fear, any great social advance.
- Randolph Bourne, American Writer
The only thing necessary for the triumph of stupidity
is for good people to go along with it.
- Edmund Burke, British Philosopher
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, it's important to
say that the true revolutionary is moved by feelings
of love. It is impossible to conceive of an
authentic revolutionary who lacks this quality.
- Che Guevara, Argentine Physician/Revolutionary
How many of you are taking courses you don't really want in
preparation for leading lives you don't really want to live?
Aren't you adapting to a cruel economy which stunts your
potential and distorts your life? Don't give in!
- Michael Harrington, American Socialist/Writer
If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness, then it is
obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their
large share of responsibility for the world, and hiding their
distaste for politics under an alleged need to be objective. The
intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to
the misery of the world, should be provocative by being
independent, should rebel against all hidden manipulations,
and should be the chief doubters of power and its incantations.
- Vaclav Havel, Czech Playwright/President
I strive to discover how to signal my companions... to
say in time a simple word, a password, like conspirators:
Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge
our hearts, let us create for Earth a brain and a heart,
let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle.
- Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek Writer
If you want to make frozen circumstances dance,
you have to sing to them in their own music.
- Karl Marx, German Philosopher
What do the circumstances of life matter if your
dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?
- Somerset Maugham, British Writer
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the
idealist fighting for peace... most easily succumbs: activism
and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form,
perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow
oneself to be carried away by the multitude of conflicting
concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to
succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one's work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful.
- Thomas Merton, American Theologian
The details of a new order of life cannot be known to us. We must
shape them ourselves. Life consists solely of searching for the
unknown and of harmonizing our actions with the new truth.
- Leo Tolstoy, Russian Writer/Philosopher
Reevaluate everything you have been told...
challenge what insults your soul.
- Walt Whitman, American Writer
A nation that cannot get angry at its official betrayers
has lost a resource more important than any other.
- Garry Wills, American Writer
The same modern American civilization that has given us unjust
laws has given us great ideals. We need to learn how to violate
these laws in such a way as to realize those ideals.
- Howard Zinn, American Historian
The human utopia... a united humankind living in solidarity and
peace, free from economic determination and from war and class
struggle-- can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy,
intelligence, and enthusiasm on realizing the human Utopia
as we have spent on realizing our technical Utopias.
- Erich Fromm, German Psychologist
When education is no longer utopian... it is either because
the future has no meaning for humans, or because humans are
afraid to risk living the future as a creative overcoming
of a present that has become extremely old.
- Paolo Freire, Brazilian Educator
Think about the kind of world you would want to
live in. What do you need to build that world? Demand
that your teachers teach you that.
Peter Kropotkin, Russian Anarchist/Writer
We have to learn to think in a new way... Shall we put
an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?
... Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
- Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher and
Albert Einstein, American Scientist
I am more interested in educating critical and self-
reflective men and women, with commitments to values,
than I am in equipping them with certain competencies,
skills, even certain kinds of information. It is the
way of being in the world and engaging with the world
that is important. The danger lies in people
becoming accommodated to the idea of an objectively
existent reality, defined by others, usually official
others, and taking that reality for granted.
- Maxine Greene, American Educator
It is organized violence on top which creates
individual violence at the bottom.
- Emma Goldman, American Anarchist/Feminist
Schools are machines for forcing spurious learning on children in
order that universities may stamp them as educated men and women when they have finally lost all power to think for themselves.
- George Bernard Shaw, Irish Writer/Playwright
But in a free country you cannot fool all of the people
all of the time. Some of them will have a talent for
fooling themselves, and they will insist on exercising it.
- Aubrey Menen, French Writer
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamoring to be led to safety) by
menacing it with an endless series of imaginery hobgoblins.
- H.L. Mencken, American Journalist
American political history is far too criminal a
subject to be a fit thing to teach young people.
- W.H. Auden, American Poet
Social violence lies not so much in the use of
bayonets but in what the bayonets protect.
- Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Activist
Men murdered themselves into this (U.S.) democracy.
- D.H. Lawrence, British Writer
Any prosecutor can convict a guilty man.
A great prosecutor can even convict an innocent man.
- Anonymous, Thin Blue Line
To kill one person is murder.
To kill thousands is foreign policy.
Moh-Tze, Chinese Writer
Americans are so demoralized and self-degraded, you could throw
them into a stewpot, and they'd stand up and salt themselves.
- Gary Indiana, American Journalist
Opinion polling was born out of a struggle not to
discover the public mind, but rather to shape it.
- Christopher Hitchens, American Journalist
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.
- Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. President
All oppression creates a state of war.
- Simone de Beauvoir, French Writer/Feminist
In our country people are rarely imprisoned for their ideas
because we are already imprisoned by our ideas.
- Marcus Garvey, American/Jamaican Activist
Poverty is the worse form of violence.
- Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Activist
It is sometimes said that war is a natural condition of man. As a military man, I do not believe it. I do believe breathing, eating, loving, caring, are natural conditions of man. People don't make war, governments do. And our governments appear willing to accept war, even nuclear war, as a natural event.
- Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque, U.S. Navy, Retired
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent
the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to
make the world safe for children to grow up in.
- Ursula LeGuin, American Writer
The streets are starting to become the private preserve of
the police; arbitrary police decisions have the force of law:
move along, keep moving, don't talk, don't give anyone what
you've written no gatherings. Prison begins far away from
the prison gates: just outside the door of your home.
- Michel Foucault, French Philosopher
We don't want justice
We don't want freedom
All we want
Is someone to love
- David Byrne, American Musician
Our government is the potent, omnipotent teacher. For good or ill,
it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law
- Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Getting tough: The only mode of conduct that makes an impression
on people who have lost all respect for human decency.
- Louis Lapham, American Writer/Editor
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
- Learned Hand, American Jurist
Loose talk about war against crime too easily infuses the administration of justice with the psychology and morals of war...the process of waging war, no matter how it is
rationalized, is a process of moral deterioration.
- Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where
ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel
that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob,
and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
- Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist
Imagine a mass of cancerous tissue, the cells of which enjoyed consciousness. Would they not be full of self-congratulatory sentiments at their independence, their more advanced level of development, their rapid rate of growth? Would they not sneer at their more primitive cousins who were bound into a static and unfree existence, with limited aspirations, subject to heavy group constraint, and obviously "going nowhere"? Would they not rejoice in their control over their own destiny, and cheer the conversion of more and more normal cells as convincing proof of the validity of their own way of life? Would they not, in fact, feel increasingly triumphant right up to the moment the organism on which they fed expired?
- Philip Slater, American Psychologist
Institutions, and especially economic institutions, have a profound influence in moulding the characters of men and women. They may encourage adventure and hope, or timidity and the pursuit of safety. They may open people's minds to great possibilities or close them against everything but the risk of obscure misfortune. They may make a man's happiness depend on what he (sic) adds to the general possessions of the world, or upon what he can secure for himself of the private goods in which others cannot share. Modern capitalism forces the wrong decision of these alternatives upon all who are not heroic or exceptionally lucky.
- Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher/Nobel Laureate
In the 17th century, we could have written of the comic illusion. In our day the illusion has become tragic. It is political. People in our time, with even greater zeal than in the 19th century, invest political affairs with their passions and hopes, but live in a peculiarly distressing political trance. Despite past experiences we have not attained a realistic view of our situation, and the interference of myths constantly frustrates political impulses and renders our thoughts out-of-date. To be sure, circumstances have made us question yesterday's political certainties; we are now aware of the tenuous nature of public opinion even if strongly affirmed in some glorious plebiscite; we know that the sovereignty of the people is an etiological myth without possible realization; we know that the popular vote is not an effective process for controlling or passing judgments on the regime, or an effective means of arbitration in the struggle between opposed political
and social forces, nor a process suited to select the ablest leaders. Although the events of the 20th century have made it
clear that the political notions treasured as truths in the
19th century are but faded myths for us, the majority
of our fellow citizens still live by them.
- Jacques Ellul, French Philosopher/Writer
A people or class which is cut off from its own past is
far less free to choose and to act as a people or class
than one that has been able to situate itself in history.
- John Berger, English Writer
__________________
THE BRIDGE OF TRUTH SHALL NEVER FALL AGAIN
