Quotes by American Authors - Page 63

As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.
Margot Lee Shetterly
For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.
Hannah Arendt
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.
Christopher Hitchens
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
Lydia Maria Francis Child
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.
Michelle Alexander
Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Now I have very little respect for the electoral system in the United States. I could have respected it in the early days, when the country was small and we had small population. The system that we have in the United States was set up at a time when the total population was the population of Tennessee. We've stretched it to try to make it work for different kind of problems and in stretching and adapting it, we've lost its meaning. We still have the form but not the meaning. There's a lot of things that we have to look at critically that might have been useful at one time that are no longer useful I think there's some good in everything. There's some bad in everything. But there's so little good in some things that you know for practical purposes they're useless. They're beyond salvation. There's so much good in some things, even though there's bad, that we build on that.
Myles Horton
If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored.
David Graeber
Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as "What is the most significant story that you have revealed?" […] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed, and that is–and I say this without the slightest bit of hyperbole or melodrama; it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative; it is literally true–that the goal of the NSA and it's five eyes partners in the English speaking world–Canada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK–is to eliminate privacy globally, to ensure that there could be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance net; they want to make sure that all forms of human communications by telephone or by Internet, and all online activities are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.That means, to describe that is to describe a ubiquitous surveillance state; you don't need hyperbole to make that claim, and you do not need to believe me when I say that that's their goal. Document after document within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little premise of the planet where some form of communications might take place without they being able to invade it.
Glenn Greenwald
It's an election year. We would prefer that voters didn't use common sense.
Aaron Sorkin
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Ezra Pound
ultimately, the long-term goal is to have a critically informed public vote out of office representatives that are sacrificing children to the corporate bottom line with prepackaged teacher-proof curricula, standardized tests, and accountability schemes.
Pepi Leistyna
The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense.
Jack Weatherford
What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of “free” individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a “conductor state.” The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management.
Paul Edward Gottfried
Current public diplomacy and foreign policy making reduces the role of American citizens to mere spectators. The USIA's model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of economic globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to clients throughout the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of people, particularly the world's poor, is strictly controlled. Such a commercial package speaks first and foremost for government 'partners,' the Fortune 500 corporations, which are the primary beneficiaries as well as the bankrollers of the American political process. This is a packaged story of America that is incomplete and undemocratic. Where do workers and communities fit into the story? How do private citizens play a part in building dialogue across cultures?
Nancy Snow
Democracy cannot function or survive without a sufficient medium by which citizens remain informed and engaged in public policy debates.
Nancy Snow
All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.
Gloria Steinem
LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy"American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.
A.E. Samaan
Tribal Chief 1: The will of the people is what is best. That is what democracy meansTribal Chief 2: But if the people don’t know what they are talking about, how can that be the best?
Leonard Wibberley
You gotta remember the smartest thing the Congress did was to limit the voters in this country. Out of 3 1/2 to 4 million people, 200,000 voted. And that was true for a helluva long time, and the republic would have never survived if all the dummies had voted along with the intelligent people.
Richard Nixon
I’d watched the election of Barack Obama with them, in Harlem: the celebration had spilled out onto the streets and erupted into dancing, outdoor champagne-drinking, euphoria. This [the 1/21/17 Women's March on Washington, DC] was different. It was like laughter at a funeral—what else can you do but hold on to who you are and who you love? What can you do but try to stay sane and fight like hell for what life is all about?
Sarah Larson
This is all very personal for me, but it's also collective, and the two are not disconnected. I have never believed that you only advocate for the things that you stand for and embody. I've always believed that our liberation, my liberation, is tied up with yours. To make a country that works for me, there's gotta be a country that works for you.
Pramila Jayapal
President George Washington’s namesake capital, once a marketplace for slave auctions, is now synonymous with democracy and freedom; so is the iconic Jefferson, who wanted to build an “Empire of Liberty” for the world.
Patrick Mendis
I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy...But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head...The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.
Howard Zinn
I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it.""I know it," Prew said."But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [..] They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a li
James Jones
Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.
Mark Gevisser
...Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the peopleare right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths,the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.
E B White
Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.
Noam Chomsky
And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.
Thomas L. Friedman
But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.
Susan Cain
A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.
Theodore Roosevelt
Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.
Nadia Hashimi
All through the winter months, Rose kept up the practice of sitting by the fire with Peter and a book telling him stories. The doctor stopped to listen one afternoon out of curiosity, and heard her say, “…then the Mermaid said to the Pirate, ‘I would rather perish with the boy than go with you.’ And the Pirate said, ‘So be it,’ and sealed them both up inside the treasure chest. Then the pirate’s crew got together to lift the chest up, and with a nod from their captain, they cast the chest overboard into the sea. The chest was so heavy, it sank in the water in spite of the air inside, and in seconds it was gone from view, disappearing into the deep blue depths. If the boy and the mermaid were unable to free themselves, they would surely perish.” Peter’s eyes were wide with interest. “But- I can’t tell you what happened- you’ll have to find out next time.” She stopped and closed the book. Peter shook his head and put his hand on the book. She laughed and said, “You want to hear more now, do you?
Christopher Daniel Mechling
I am the unseen. For centuries I have been here, beneath this great city, this metropolis. I know your language. I know all languages. . . . My cave is broad and cool. The sun cannot send its heat down here. The damp soil is rich and fragrant. I turn softly on my back and place my eight legs to the cave ceiling. Then, I listen. I am the spider. I see sound. I feel taste. I hear touch. I spin this story. This is the story I’ve spun.
Nnedi Okorafor
Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.
Nancy Mellon
People live in fear of bad being out to get them, when in reality, the bad side is there only to be in polar opposite proportion to the positive that you are destined to thrive in. Conquer the negative, and thrive in the positive.
C. JoyBell C.
Spend as much time as possible with positive, joyful people and as little time as possible with negative, unhappy people.
Molly Friedenfeld
Each of us has a finite reservoir of energy in any given day. Whatever amount of energy we spend obsessing about missteps we have made, decisions that do not go our way or the belief we have been treated unfairly is energy no longer available to add value in the world.
Tony Schwartz
The way is open, ride the wave of success again today. You can't lose.
Sereda Aleta Dailey
I can't change you and you can't change me, but together we can work to change the world.
Germany Kent
Restoring order of my personal universe suddenly seemed imperative, as I refolded my T-shirts, stuffed the toes of my shoes with tissue paper, and arranged all the bills in my secret stash box facing the same way, instead of tossed in sloppy and wild, as if by my evil twin. All week, I kept making lists and crossing things off them, ending each day with a sense of great accomplishment eclipsed only by complete and total exhaustion.
Sarah Dessen
Someone once said that there are always flowers for those who want to find flowers. I think that's true. But I also think that there are always cakes for those who want to find cakes.
C. JoyBell C.
The past is gone. My life is a miracle! With gratitude to God, I am still here to remember and to tell what happened to me during the Holocaust of WWII.
Leah Cik Roth
I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor's table which, in one of The System's obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box.
Sergio de la Pava
The Defendant: I am pleading guilty your honors but I'm doing it because I think it would be a waste of money to have a trial over five dollars worth of crack. What I really need is a drug program because I want to turn my life around and the only reason I was doing what I was doing on the street was to support my habit. The habit has to be fed your honors as you know and I believe in working for my money. I could be out there robbing people but I'm not and I've always worked even though I am disabled. And not always at this your honors, I used to be a mail carrier back in the day but then I started using drugs and that was all I wanted to do. So I'm taking this plea to save the city of New York and the taxpayers money because I can't believe that the DA, who I can see is a very tall man, would take to trial a case involving five dollars worth of crack, especially knowing how much a trial of that nature would cost. But I still think that I should get a chance to do a drug program because I've never been given that chance in any of my cases and the money that will be spent keeping me in jail could be spent addressing my real problem which is that I like, no need, to smoke crack every day and every chance I get, and if I have to point people to somebody who's selling the stuff so I can get one dollar and eventually save up enough to buy a vial then smoke it immediately and start saving up for my next one that I'll gladly do that, and I'll do it even though I know it could land me in jail for years because the only thing that matters at that moment is getting my next vial and I am not a Homo-sapiens-sexual your honors but if I need money to buy crack I will suck. . . .
Sergio de la Pava
The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whether it's harder for the people in this audience to succeed be they extraordinary, average, or below average. If it is, and I think it obvious that it is, then that's untenable in a country that purports to provide equal opportunity for all. Now of course you'll dispute my claim that it is more difficult to succeed for them. You say the battle's over. I say not only is it not over but you yourself are stationed on the frontline of the battle and have been all these years. This room and the criminal justice system as a whole is the frontline. This is where modern-day segregation lives on.
Sergio de la Pava
Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood-drenched, bitter world — no longer laughing — cries for a way out. There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together. They are not laws — they are The Law.
Cecil B. DeMille
NC passed law against global warming science, therefore it's not happening. So I'm ignoring Twitter's 140-character limit, so it's not happ
Stephen Colbert
Outside my bike, never has anything important in my life been just mine." My body stilled, so did my heart, and my eyes locked with his. He started moving again, slowly, deeply and he kept talking. "Always castoffs, leftovers, used, sometimes even food from the dumpsters." My heart started beating again, only to trip over itself; my breath came fast, not only from what was happening to my body but what he was saying. "Vance-" His lips came to mine, his hands moved out of my hair and went to the side of my face and he stared in my eyes, pressing deep inside. "Mine," he muttered, his deep voice hoarse, that fierce undercurrent there. His tone caused a shiver to run through me, straight through to my soul. Then he kissed me.
Kristen Ashley
By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.
Philip K. Howard
This is England," he explained. "Tell someone it's a procedure, and they'll believe you. The pointless procedure is one of our great natural resources.
Maureen Johnson
However, this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules—a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.
Colleen McMahon
For those who believe executive branch officials will voluntarily interpret their surveillance authorities with restraint, I believe it is more likely that I will achieve my life-long dream of playing in the NBA.
Ron Wyden
I know it when I see itJacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), concurring op.
Justice Potter Stewart
With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism.
Greg L. Bahnsen
Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there and they can give their legitimate efforts to… boy the thing they had to write about was theonomy! How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he doesn’t see the problem?
Greg L. Bahnsen
In 1996 Dorothy Mackey wrote an Op-ed piece, “Violence from comrades a fact of life for military women.” ABC News 20/ 20 did a segment on rape in the military. By November four women came forward at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, about a pattern of rape by drill sergeants. In 1997 the military finds three black drill sergeants to scapegoat. They were sent to prison and this left the commanding generals and colonels untouched to retire quietly. The Army appointed a panel to investigate sexual harassment. One of the panelists was the sergeant Major of the Army, Eugene McK
Diane Chamberlain
Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.
Lauren Slater
I was willing to do it. was determined to do it. By the end of the day, that had become my reaction to all of the signs of hard things ahead - a new purposefulness, hardy resolve. Everything I'd encountered so far - the law, my classmates, the great piece of discovery - had left me in deep thrall and I was bent on making sure that continued. I would have the best of it, I decided, whatever the obstacles.
Scott Turow