Activists from New York City

"Oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me or I wouldn't be wearing it!"

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be "damned if you do, and damned if you don't.""

"Understanding is a two-way street."

"It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it."

"We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."

"To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times — The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give."

"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life."

"My husband plunged into work on a speech and I went off to work on an article. Midnight came and bed for all, and all that was said was "good night, sleep well, pleasant dreams, with the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.'"

"I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity."

"When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die."

"I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision."

"Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world."

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"

"You get more joy out of the giving to others, and should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give."

"I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on."

"On April 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman received an urgent summons from the White House. When he arrived, Eleanor Roosevelt told him, “The President is dead.” Truman asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” Mrs. Roosevelt responded, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”"

"I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: "No good in a bed, but fine against a wall"."

"Up to a certain point it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty to the limit of their ability. I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior."

"The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give."

"The purpose of life...is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

"One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility."

"One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. … All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there's one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else."

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

"A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity."

"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively."

""Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom." This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then — it has to be lived with. For freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect. We must all face an unpalatable fact that we have, too often, a tendency to skim over; we proceed on the assumption that all men want freedom. This is not as true as we would like it to be. Many men and women who are far happier when they have relinquish their freedom, when someone else guides them, makes their decisions for them, takes the responsibility for them and their actions. They don't want to make up their minds. They don't want to stand on their own feet."

"It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death. (1 April 1939)"

"I was one of those who was very happy when the original prohibition amendment passed. I thought innocently that a law in this country would automatically be complied with, and my own observation led me to feel rather ardently that the less strong liquor anyone consumed the better it was. During prohibition I observed the law meticulously, but I came gradually to see that laws are only observed with the consent of the individuals concerned and a moral change still depends on the individual and not on the passage of any law. (14 July 1939)"

"Little by little it dawned upon me that this law was not making people drink any less, but it was making hypocrites and law breakers of a great number of people. It seemed to me best to go back to the old situation in which, if a man or woman drank to excess, they were injuring themselves and their immediate family and friends and the act was a violation against their own sense of morality and no violation against the law of the land. (14 July 1939)"

"Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people? (16 October 1939)"

"No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. (20 December 1939)"

"When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor. (23 February 1940)"

"I have a great belief in spiritual force, but I think we have to realize that spiritual force alone has to have material force with it so long as we live in a material world. The two together make a strong combination. (17 May 1940)"

"Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little. (1 July 1940)"

"One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable. (11 September 1941)"

"Long ago, I made up my mind that when things were said involving only me, I would pay no attention to them, except when valid criticism was carried by which I could profit. (14 January 1942)"

"One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short. (5 February 1943)"

"At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want — for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war. (15 April 1943)"

"One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. (11 May 1943)"

"Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth. (22 August 1944)"

"I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could. (8 November 1944)"

"It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself. (15 June 1946)"

"I have waited a while before saying anything about the Un-American Activities Committee's current investigation of the Hollywood film industry. I would not be very much surprised if some writers or actors or stagehands, or what not, were found to have Communist leanings, but I was surprised to find that, at the start of the inquiry, some of the big producers were so chicken-hearted about speaking up for the freedom of their industry. One thing is sure — none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring. Certainly, the Thomas Committee is growing more ludicrous daily. (29 October 1947)"

"The film industry is a great industry with infinite possibilities for good and bad. Its primary purpose is to entertain people. On the side, it can do many other things. It can popularize certain ideals, it can make education palatable. But in the long run, the judge who decides whether what it does is good or bad is the man or woman who attends the movies. In a democratic country I do not think the public will tolerate a removal of its right to decide what it thinks of the ideas and performances of those who make the movie industry work. (29 October 1947)"

"What is going on in the Un-American Activities Committee worries me primarily because little people have become frightened and we find ourselves living in the atmosphere of a police state, where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion. I have been one of those who have carried the fight for complete freedom of information in the United Nations. And while accepting the fact that some of our press, our radio commentators, our prominent citizens and our movies may at times be blamed legitimately for things they have said and done, still I feel that the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do. In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good. The Un-American Activities Committee seems to me to be better for a police state than for the USA. (29 October 1947)"

"The mobilization of world opinion and methods of negotiation should be developed and used by every nation in order to strengthen the United Nations. Then if we are forced into war, it will be because there has been no way to prevent it through negotiation and the mobilization of world opinion. In which case we should have the voluntary support of many nations, which is far better than the decision of one nation alone, or even of a few nations. (16 April 1954)"

"This is a time for action — not for war, but for mobilization of every bit of peace machinery. It is also a time for facing the fact that you cannot use a weapon, even though it is the weapon that gives you greater strength than other nations, if it is so destructive that it practically wipes out large areas of land and great numbers of innocent people. (16 April 1954 )"

"If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people. (5 November 1958)"

"The arts in every field — music, drama, sculpture, painting — we can learn to appreciate and enjoy. We need not be artists, but we should be able to appreciate the work of artists. (5 November 1958)"

"If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively. For people to have more time to read, to take part in their civic obligations, to know more about how their government functions and who their officials are might mean in a democracy a great improvement in the democratic processes. Let's begin, then, to think how we can prepare old and young for these new opportunities. Let's not wait until they come upon us suddenly and we have a crisis that we will be ill prepared to meet. (5 November 1958)"

"In times past, the question usually asked by women was "How can we best help to defend our nation?" I cannot remember a time when the question on so many people's lips was "How can we prevent war?" There is a widespread understanding among the people of this nation, and probably among the people of the world, that there is no safety except through the prevention of war. For many years war has been looked upon as almost inevitable in the solution of any question that has arisen between nations, and the nation that was strong enough to do so went about building up its defenses and its power to attack. It felt that it could count on these two things for safety. (20 December 1961)"

"A consciousness of the fact that war means practically total destruction is the reason, I think, for the rising tide to prevent what seems such a senseless procedure. I understand that it is perhaps difficult for some people, whose lives have been lived with a sense of the need for military development, to envisage the possibility of being no longer needed. But the average citizen is beginning to think more and more of the need to develop machinery to settle difficulties in the world without destruction or the use of atomic bombs. (20 December 1961)"

"We should begin in our own environment and in our own community as far as possible to build a peace-loving attitude and learn to discipline ourselves to accept, in the small things of our lives, mediation and arbitration. As individuals, there is little that any of us can do to prevent an accidental use of bombs in the hands of those who already have them. We can register, however, with our government a firm protest against granting the knowledge and the use of these weapons to those who do not now have them. (20 December 1961)"

"As long as we are not actually destroyed, we can work to gain greater understanding of other peoples and to try to present to the peoples of the world the values of our own beliefs. We can do this by demonstrating our conviction that human life is worth preserving and that we are willing to help others to enjoy benefits of our civilization just as we have enjoyed it. (20 December 1961)"

"We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight."

"Human resources are the most valuable assets the world has. They are all needed desperately."

"There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor."

"We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity. In the final analysis, a democratic government represents the sum total of the courage and the integrity of its individuals. It cannot be better than they are. … In the long run there is no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely and then act boldly."

"What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now."

"Example is the best lesson there is."

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

"Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until you put them in hot water."

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift... that's why they call it the present."

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself"

"America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed."

"I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday."

"I believe that women writers have not engaged or been allowed to participate in the discourse of official remembrance and that this is why their literature has been able to capture the frailty of the human spirit as well as its depth. Women writers who have contributed to the softness of remembrance can be traced from the early diary writings of young Anne Frank, to the visionary human rights declaration of Eleanor Roosevelt, and finally, to the powerful denouncing of apartheid by Nadine Gordimer."

"We know now, thanks to historian Blanche Weisen Cook, that Eleanor had a very complicated, intimate, most-probably sexual relationship with Lorena Hickok, who was a journalist. At one point, Eleanor moved her into the White House with her. And that Hickok's reporting upon Eleanor Roosevelt was integral to Eleanor Roosevelt's promotion of herself as a social reformer. Along with this, we do know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a wide, wide circle of female friends, many of whom were lesbians, many of whom were involved with social work. These women as an aggregate were called "Roosevelt's Brain Trust." And, in fact, Eleanor brought them to Washington and they were instrumental in forming the New Deal. Francis Perkins, one of Eleanor's intimate friends, was the first woman to head the Labor Department. So I think when we're looking at Eleanor Roosevelt's life, it's not just interesting that she had this affair with a woman-- she also apparently had an affair with her chauffer, named Earl Miller, as well, so Eleanor's life was complicated-- but what is really amazing that there is this circle of friends--which, again, Blanche Weisen Cook calls "female support networks"--that literally changed our very notions of how social work functions in American society and how reform functions. All again based upon lesbian--or women being intimate with women--relationships."

"Eleanor Roosevelt came to New York City and I was in a, a contest, a debating contest, and I won the debate in the whole city of New York…I'll never forget this tall woman, her hair in a chignon, and this little porkpie hat on, and she was ugly. She was very ugly. But Eleanor, the moment she opened her mouth, you felt a warmth. It was beautiful."

"Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive ... One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been."

"Her real need to be of service overcame the hurt caused by her critics however, and she worked tirelessly all the years of Franklin's presidency. When he died she filled the void by working all the more. She had believed that When she was out of the White House there would he nothing more for her to do, "because she considered herself as an auxiliary to her husband and felt that her own value had been as First lady, not Eleanor Roosevelt. President Truman felt otherwise however, prevailing upon her to work for the newly formed United Nations. She spent the last years of her life travelling and working for the possibility of permanent world peace... she never stinted on her own time, energy, money, or compassion to help a stranger in need. Her greatness was in her kindness and empathy not, as her critics often pointed out, in her intellect ... She was given more tributes, medals and awards than any other woman in American history. Her books were translated into all major European languages, including Russian and Serbo Croatian, four Indian dialects and Hebrew, but in spite of all this Eleanor was not satisfied. She judged herself not on what she had accomplished, but what yet remained to be done, commenting that the knowledge of how little one can do alone had taught her humility. So she kept up her struggle against the injustices of the world."

"I buy 100 copies at a time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was Eleanor Roosevelt's great work...I sometimes, if it's an adult audience, ask how many of them are familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most highly educated people have never read it. It's a tragic erasure of our heritage. It was such a time of hope. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes economic rights."

"Besides giving me the most interesting job I could possibly imagine, the Women's Trade League brought many wonderful friends into my life. Among them were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. I first met her when I was raising money for the League clubhouse. She called me her teacher, for she said I taught her all she knew about trade unionism. Always generous and understanding, she never refused me anything I asked for. This is quite a statement coming from me because, though I find it hard to ask for things for myself, I could ask for the moon if I needed it for the League. For twelve weeks during the depression, when we were having a hard time meeting our obligations, she shared her broadcasting fees with us. That $300 each week kept us going at a time when many of our supporters, hard-hit by the stock-market crash, could not help us."

"I have lost more than a beloved friend. I have lost an inspiration. She would rather light candles than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world."

"She thought of herself as an ugly duckling, but she walked in beauty in the ghettos of the world, bringing with her the reminder of her beloved St. Francis, "It is in the giving that we receive." And wherever she walked beauty was forever there."

"Part of my job in Noumea consisted in briefing frequent important visitors. One was Mrs. Roosevelt, who had tried unsuccessfully to visit us on Guadalcanal. She now turned up sporting a letter from the President to Halsey and me- she would go to the island provided we could take satisfactory security precautions, which we did. Eleanor Roosevelt was a remarkable woman, seemingly tireless during her frequent peregrinations. When Halsey and I met her in Noumea we proposed to take her to the Red Cross center where she could comfortably rest from her long flight. No, indeed- she insisted on going directly to the nearest hospital. She spent the bulk of her time in new Caledonia visiting our sick and wounded, talking to them by the hundreds. In each case she took the man's home address and upon her return to America wrote his family."

"such courageous spirits as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt."

"I think of Eleanor Roosevelt as a woman of such human and uncompromising qualities that they make her not just in name but truly the first lady of the land."

"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

"What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of "art for art's sake" than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore — and then there will be time enough for art."

"Let us redeem our great words from base uses. Let that no longer call itself Love, which knows that it is not free!"

"I know you are brave and unselfish people, making sacrifices for a great principle but I cannot join you. I believe in the present effort which the allies are making to suppress German militarism. I would approve of America going to their assistance. I would enlist to that end, if ever there be a situation where I believe I could do more with my hands than I could with my pen."

"I have lived in Germany and know its language and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its rulers. Having given many years to a study of American capitalism, I am not blind to the defects of my own country; but, in spite of these defects, I assert that the difference between the ruling class of Germany and that of America is the difference between the seventeenth century and the twentieth. No question can be settled by force, my pacifist friends all say. And this in a country in which a civil war was fought and the question of slavery and secession settled! I can speak with especial certainty of this question, because all my ancestors were Southerners and fought on the rebel side; I myself am living testimony to the fact that force can and does settle questions — when it is used with intelligence. In the same way I say if Germany be allowed to win this war — then we in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the democratic principle."

"American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whenever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany, and until it was made true in Germany, there could be no free political democracy anywhere else in the world — to say nothing of any free social democracy. My revolutionary friends who will not recognize this fact seem to me like a bunch of musicians sitting down to play a symphony concert in a forest where there is a man-eating tiger loose. For my part, much as I enjoy symphony concerts, I want to put my fiddle away in its case and get a rifle and go out and settle with the tiger."

"Men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled lust, and then, in their old age, they are helpless victims of their own impulses."

"I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit, when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country."

"I am a person who has never used violence himself. My present opinion is that people who have obtained the ballot should use it and solve their problems in that way. In the case of peoples who have not obtained the ballot, and who cannot control their states, I again find in my own mind a division of opinion, which is not logical, but purely a rough practical judgment. My own forefathers got their political freedom by violence; that is to say, they overthrew the British crown and made themselves a free Republic. Also by violence they put an end to the enslavement of the black race on this continent."

"All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda."

"I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book."

"I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!""

"Fascism is capitalism plus murder."

"The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to "End Poverty in California" I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them."

"I just put on what the lady says. I've been married three times, so I've had lots of supervision."

"He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do — he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest."

"A new burst of rage swept over him — What did it matter whether it was true or not — whether anything was true or not? What did it matter if anybody had done all the hideous and loathsome things that everybody else said they had done? It was what everybody was saying! It was what everybody believed — what everybody was interested in! It was the measure of a whole society — their ideals and their standards! It was the way they spent their time, repeating nasty scandals about each other; living in an atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism, with endless whispering and leering, and gossip of low intrigue."

"I'm going to stop squandering money for things I don't want. I'm going to stop accepting invitations, and meeting people I don't like and don't want to know. I've tried your game — I've tried it hard, and I don't like it; and I'm going to get out before it's too late. I'm going to find some decent and simple place to live in; and I'm going down town to find out if there isn't some way in New York for a man to earn an honest living!"

"Over the vast plain I wander, observing a thousand strange and incredible and terrifying manifestations of the Bootstrap-lifting impulse. There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time ago — no man can recall how far back — the Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in support of the practice. Now their propaganda is everywhere triumphant, and year by year we see an increase in the rewards and emoluments of the prophets and priests of the cult. The ground is covered with stately temples of various designs, all of which I am told are consecrated to Bootstrap-lifting."

"I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting."

"Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to say when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty and greed? What I say is — Bootstrap-lifting!"

"When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity ; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times."

"There would be dreamers of dreams and seers of visions and hearers of voices; readers of the entrails of beasts and interpreters of the flight of birds; there would be burning bushes and stone tablets on mountain-tops, and inspired words dictated to aged disciples on lonely islands. There would arise special castes of men and women, learned in these sacred matters; and these priestly castes would naturally emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold themselves aloof from the common herd, endowed with special powers and entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles in ways favorable to themselves and their order; they would proclaim themselves friends and confidants of the god, walking with him in the night-time, receiving his messengers and angels, acting as his deputies in forgiving offenses, in dealing punishments and in receiving gifts. They would become makers of laws and moral codes. They would wear special costumes to distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to impress their followers, employing all sensuous effects, architecture and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and dancing, candles and incense and bells and gongs."

"The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it — and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived."

"The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence."

"In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil. But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise of no less a person than the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion."

"Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters."

"The methods by which the "Empire of Business" maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry."

"The reader will understand that I despise these "yellows"; they are utterly without honor, they are vulgar and cruel; and yet, in spite of all their vices, I count them less dangerous to society than the so-called "respectable" papers, which pretend to all the virtues, and set the smug and pious tone for good society — papers like the "New York Tribune" and the "Boston Evening Transcript" and the "Baltimore Sun," which are read by rich old gentlemen and maiden aunts, and can hardly ever be forced to admit to their columns any new or vital event or opinion. These are "kept" papers, in the strictest sense of the term, and do not have to hustle on the street for money. They serve the pocketbooks of the whole propertied class — which is the meaning of the term "respectability" in the bourgeois world. On the other hand the "yellow" journals, serving their own pocketbooks exclusively, will often print attacks on vested wealth, provided the attacks are startling and sensational, and provided the vested wealth in question is not a heavy advertiser."

"In the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege, I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America. The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man's life. I have been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventured to bring me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury of American citizens."

"When Mr. John P. Gavit, managing editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation "as an insatiable hunter of personal publicity," what Mr. Gavit meant was that I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to."

"Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come."

"An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain."

"Wherever there was a group of people, and a treasure to be administered, there Peter knew was backbiting and scandal and intriguing and spying, and a chance for somebody whose brains were "all there.""

"It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest."

"Private ownership of tools, a basis of freedom when tools are simple becomes a basis of enslavement when tools are complex."

"[H]ere are three sentences for you to paste in your hat and learn by heart. First: Credit is the life blood of industry, and the control of credit is the control of all society. Second: The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery. And Third: The American banking system is the most perfect contrivance yet devised by the human brain for making the rich richer and the poor poorer."

"What Fielding was to the eighteenth century and Dickens to the nineteenth, Sinclair is to our own. The overwhelming knowledge and passionate expression of specific wrongs are more stirring, more interesting, and also more taxing than the cynical censure of Fielding and the sentimental lamentations of Dickens."

"I look upon Upton Sinclair as one of the greatest novelists in the world, the Zola of America."

"He (Sinclair) is in the doghouse here because he relentlessly sheds light on the hurly-burly dark side of American life."

"Mr. Sinclair would have died in obscurity but for “The Jungle,” which didn’t move a hair upon the heads of the Armours, but netted the author a large sum and a reputation. He may now write the most stupid stuff, sure of finding a market. Yet there is not a workingman anywhere so cringing before respectability as Mr. Sinclair."

"My concept of what it meant to be a revolutionary was based on a montage of the organizers from the Sinclair novels, along with my childhood memories from Denver."

"We also learned an important lesson from Sinclair's campaign. Sinclair had been a socialist ever since the Debs era. He had run for office on the Socialist ticket many times without much success. In 1934, to the dismay of his comrades in the Socialist Party, and to our contempt, he decided to run for the Democratic nomination for governor in California. He put together a ticket called End Poverty in California, or EPIC, which took as its slogan "production for use, not profit," and advocated state-sponsored cooperative enterprises. The EPIC movement swept the Democratic Party, gained Sinclair the Democratic nomination (if not, ultimately, the governorship), and roused enormous popular enthusiasm. We would have nothing to do with the Democratic Party, and so we were left on the outside, denouncing the movement. We called him a "social fascist," which was terrible nonsense. (Lest it be thought that such sectarianism was solely a CP attribute, it's worth remembering that the Socialist Party expelled Sinclair for his act of heresy.) Our position was that you could not reform a capitalist party, that nothing could be gained through the two-party system."

"I did not want to say these unpleasant things, but you have written to me, asking my opinion, and I give it to you, flat. If you would get over two ideas — first that any one who criticizes you is an evil and capitalist-controlled spy, and second that you have only to spend a few weeks on any subject to become a master of it — you might yet regain your now totally lost position as the leader of American socialistic journalism."

"I am against the violation of civil rights by Hitler and Mussolini as much as you are, and well you know it. But I am also against the wholesale murders, confiscations and other outrages that have gone on in Russia. I think it is fair to say that you pseudo-communists are far from consistent here. You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist."

"Upton Sinclair's victory is astounding. It bears him out in his early assurance of success and his insistence from the beginning that he sensed a ground swell of revolt against the present order. It is the more remarkable because of the widespread belief that the red scare following the general strike had so aroused California that there was a reaction against the radicalism of Mr. Sinclair. . . . He [will] win others to his belief that the economic and political jungle we live in today is no more necessary and inevitable than were the foul horrors of that human cesspool of the stockyards which he-to his everlasting honor-revealed in his most famous book, "The Jungle.""

"Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle at a time when Lincoln Steffens was writing about the political evils of the day and during the muckraking period of Ray Stannard Baker, and others. Sinclair was the only one of these muckrakers who drew the logical political conclusions. At the end of The Jungle he advocated socialism as the remedy for the terrible conditions in industry under private ownership."

"I have regarded you, not as a novelist, but as an historian; for it is my considered opinion, unshaken at 85, that records of fact are not history. They are only annals, which cannot become historical until the artist-poet-philosopher rescues them from the unintelligible chaos of their actual occurrence and arranges them in works of art. When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels. They object that the people in your books never existed; that their deeds were never done and their sayings never uttered. I assure them that they were, except that Upton Sinclair individualized and expressed them better than they could have done, and arranged their experiences, which as they actually occurred were as unintelligible as pied type, in significant and intelligible order."

"If you are not too much mesmerized by the naïveté with which Mr. Sinclair describes the world of wealth and power - he has the innocent leer of a small-boy socialist watching a capitalist strip-tease - Wide Is the Gate is an easy way to refresh your knowledge of historical events not very distant in memory."

"I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views."

"Upton Sinclair had come along, a young man with a mighty determination, and against heavy odds forced the publication of his novel, The Jungle, based upon his first-hand observations of the conditions under which meat was packed in the Chicago stockyards and under which the workers there lived. And President Theodore Roosevelt, who had testified that he would as soon have eaten his old hat as the canned meat furnished the American troops by the Chicago packers in 1898, appointed a commission to investigate Sinclair's charges."

"Conservatives have a problem with women. For that matter, all men do."

"My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that's because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism."

"I have to say I'm all for public flogging. One type of criminal that a public humiliation might work particularly well with are the juvenile delinquents, a lot of whom consider it a badge of honor to be sent to juvenile detention. And it might not be such a cool thing in the 'hood' to be flogged publicly."

"I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote."

"I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't."

"No wonder you guys lost."

"Her children knew she's sleeping with all these men. That just seems to me, it's the definition of "not a good mother." … Is everyone just saying here that it's okay to ostentatiously have premarital sex in front of your children? … [Diana is] an ordinary and pathetic and confessional — I've never had bulimia! I've never had an affair! I've never had a divorce! So I don't think she's better than I am."

"If those kids had been carrying guns they would have gunned down this one gunman. … Don't pray. Learn to use guns."

"We were terrified that Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president."

"If we're going to have sex crimes, it cannot be that people are allowed to lie about sex. Rape, child molestation, sodomy, indecent, exposure, prostitution-these are all sex crimes. People may have disagreements with the substantive law-for example, by opposing the application of sexual harassment laws to politicians who are "good" on abortion-but whatever the substantive law is, it is not okay to lie in a judicial proceedings. The laws cannot be abstracted from the judicial proceedings necessary to enforce the law If lying about sex doesn't count. then there cannot be sex crimes."

"Southerners are truly our warrior class."

"That was the theme of the Million Mom March: I don't need a brain — I've got a womb."

"The New York Times is cheering the decision of Mount Holyoke College to stop requiring that students submit their SAT scores for admission, ending what the Times calls "the tyranny of the big test." While conceding that the SAT measures "mental dexterity," the editorial complains that the test does not capture qualities such as "motivation" or what the student "learned in high school." The SAT also doesn't measure compassion, speed or good looks. It does, however, measure something more than the ability to suck up to your high school teachers and guidance counselors."

"It is true that some percentage of bright people really do not test well, but most of the time the only thing about "common man's intelligence" that is indubitably true is that it is common. The concept of some ephemeral, elusive nonverbal intelligence simply allows one to impute intelligence to anyone who strikes your fancy. … Eliminating standardized tests allows the cognitive elite to manipulate the soft stuff in ways the less-often-washed cannot. Mount Holyoke has accomplished nothing more than replacing a tyranny of merit with a tyranny of privilege."

"In his fawning hagiography of Teddy Kennedy, Clymer wrote that Kennedy's liberal voting record made up for his killing that girl at Chappaquiddick. I didn't believe it either, but Clymer actually wrote: Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne." (A review in The Washington Monthly said Clymer's Chappaquiddick section did "not sugarcoat his subject's flaws.") This is the way addled liberals really think. Even as they champion sucking the brains out of little babies, they think of themselves as indelibly compassionate because they favor an overweening, behemoth federal government."

"The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars — that's the Biblical view."

"Liberals are always frightened by diversity of opinion. They think a fair way to decide passionately contested issues is for the federal government to issue uncompromising edicts giving liberals everything they want, and then to suppress all criticism of the edicts. The fascistic order, completely supplanting all democratic processes, is then known as a victory for "choice." As the Grand Inquisitor said in The Brothers Karamazov: "They have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy." That's what the Supreme Court did in Roe vs. Wade, and has repeatedly done in periodic codicils to its original edict. Just this past term, in Stenberg vs. Carhart, the court expanded the apocryphal abortion right to an all-new right to stick a fork in the head of a half-born baby. The first lunacy keeps being rewritten to give abortion enthusiasts everything they could possibly want."

"You remember what a fabulous success court-ordered "desegregation" plans have been. Few failures have been more spectacular. Illiterate students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell is just one of the many eggs that had to be broken to make the left's omelette of transferring power from states to the federal government."

"I think [women] should be armed but should not vote … women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it … it's always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care."

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, "Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.""

"The presumption of innocence only means you don't go right to jail."

"Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

"After the World Trade Center was bombed by Islamic fundamentalists in 1993, the country quickly chalked it up to a zany one-time attack and five minutes later decided we were all safe again. We weren't. We aren't now. They will strike again. Perhaps they will wait another eight years. But perhaps not. The enemy is in this country right now. And any terrorists who are not already here are free to immigrate."

"Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims — at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours. How are we to distinguish the peaceful Muslims from the fanatical, homicidal Muslims about to murder thousands of our fellow citizens?"

"A cruise missile is more important than Head Start."

"Taxes are like abortion, and not just because both are grotesque procedures supported by Democrats. You're for them or against them. Taxes go up or down; government raises taxes or lowers them. But Democrats will not let the words abortion or tax cuts pass their lips."

"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

"Point one and point two by the end of the week had become official government policy. As for converting them to Christianity, I think it might be a good idea to get them on some sort of hobby other than slaughtering infidels. I mean perhaps that's the Peace Corps, perhaps it's working for Planned Parenthood, but I've never seen the transforming effect of anything like that of Christianity."

"There are a lot of bad Republicans; there are no good Democrats."

"But I do think the posting of gay unions is a little bit ridiculous. And I think it looks like a parody out of "The Onion." Will they be showing them, you know, in full regalia getting dressed? Will we know which one is keeping his last name? I mean, I just think it's not doing a service to gays. I think it makes them look ridiculous."

"But, no, I mean, the wedding pages, they're always done for the bride's sake. I think most grooms find the whole wedding ceremony something, you know, they're forced to go through and a little bit preposterous. So, I'm having -- having two grooms, I just can't imagine anyone wanting that. I'd just as soon get out of it altogether. I would take that as one of the advantages of being gay and not try to get in on it."

"I think the contracts are different from these photos. I mean, contractual benefits I can see a good argument for. Photos in the "New York Times" nuptial section, that's just embarrassing."

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

"Liberals hate America, they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now."

"If liberals were prevented from ever again calling Republicans dumb, they would be robbed of half their arguments. To be sure, they would still have "racist," "fascist," "homophobe," "ugly," and a few other highly nuanced arguments in the quiver. But the loss of "dumb" would nearly cripple them."

"Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals and they can't stand the competition."

"There's a reason the left's rhetoric bears such a striking resemblance to some of the nuttier religions: Abhorring real religions, liberals refuse to condemn what societies have condemned for thousands of years — e.g., promiscuity, divorce, illegitimacy, homosexuality. Consequently the normal human instinct to condemn something bubbles up against a legion of quite modern vices, such as smoking, fur, red meat, excessive consumption, and land development."

"Most devastating for the left as a cohesive political movement was the collapse of their beloved Soviet Union. For decades the Great Issue uniting various forces on the left, from proclaimed communists to soft anti-communists, was the socialist "ideal." … Apart from global warming — coming in a thousand years to a planet near you! — the left's only remaining cause is abortion. For many Democrats, Roe v. Wade is the essence of politics."

"Where there is a vacuum of ideas, paranoia slips in. Much of the left's hate speech bears greater similarity to a psychological disorder than to standard political discourse. The hatred is blinding, producing logical contradictions that would be impossible to sustain were it not for the central element faith plays in the left's new religion. The basic tenet of their faith is this: Maybe they were wrong about their facts and policies, but they are good and conservatives are evil. You almost want to give it to them. It's all they have left."

"Grove quotes me – and the quotes are things I actually said! That is stunningly rare. … What liberals normally do in response to a principled conservative argument is lie, manufacture quotes, and call conservatives names – as some dissolute drunk did in the New York Post a few days later. The left's logic deficit is a topic I explore thoroughly in my book. Buy it and prepare to have your blood run hot. Oh, and for the record, Howard Kurtz is wrong about the reason I call him the Liberal Ombudsman for Liberal Media Bias in my book – it was not the "girly-boy" quote. Paradoxically, that is the ONLY time Kurtz has quoted me accurately."

"The reason propaganda works is that most people are too involved or too stupid to recognize it as propaganda. People claim to understand the bias and filter it out, but that's absurd. Of course they don't."

"Though Rather is congenitally bad – an admirable heir to Walter Cronkite and his special form of treasonous broadcasting – more insidious are certain chirpy girl-next-door morning TV hosts who characterize the beliefs of ordinary middle-class Americans in terms that would make Goebbels blush."

"Liberals don't read books – they don't read anything … That's why they're liberals. They watch TV, absorb the propaganda, and vote on the basis of urges."

"Liberals' only remaining big issue is abortion because of their beloved sexual revolution. That's their cause: Spreading anarchy and polymorphous perversity. Abortion permits that."

"We should be fingerprinting environmentalists … As for what can be done to convince Americans that we face an enemy that hates America as much as the terrorists, we should put people like Ann Coulter on TV more, stop with the infernal nonsense of thinking liberals are decent but misguided people, and characterize the threat appropriately. … Start by telling the truth about them: They are out to destroy the country."

"I was not enthusiastic about the last Gulf war. Of course, it goes without saying, I rooted for our team once the shooting started. But I wasn't for that war. I was also against sending Americans to the Balkans. My point is, I'm genuinely against America deploying troops without a really, really good reason. I just can't imagine anyone not seeing 9/11 as a really good reason for wiping out Islamic totalitarians."

"It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 — except Goldwater in '64 — the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted."

"This is my idea. I'm way ahead of you. I think airlines ought to start advertising: 'We have the most civil rights lawsuits brought against us by Arabs.'"

"They could use magic carpets."

"If Chicago had been hit, I assure you New Yorkers would not have cared. What was stunning when New York was hit was how the rest of America rushed to New York's defense. New Yorkers would have been like, "It's tough for them; now let's go back to our Calvin Klein fashion shows.""

"Gay sex may well be a mystery of life, but I’ll be damned if I can find it in the Constitution."

"Between issuing laws prohibiting discrimination against transgendered individuals and running up a $38 billion deficit, the California Legislature mandated a three-week immersion course in Islam for all seventh-graders."

"My argument is that there's nothing about same-sex marriage in the Constitution. I don't think I have taken a position on same-sex marriage. Very simple. I sort of resent being pulled into these things. I'm writing about foreign policy. I'm writing about liberals, but every time the Supreme Court gets some new flight of fancy, suddenly, I have to come up with a white paper policy position. Not with this audience, but be I think it is worth mentioning in --... well, I guess the three of you, the three liberals here. What do you think sodomy is great thing and gays should be married, it's not in the Constitutions, and every time the Supreme Court rules on something that is not in the Constitution, it's taking your rights away. You might like it today, but someday, I could have my conservative activists on the court."

"As I have said when it first came up at the moment, I don't, because what's the point? We already have a Constitution and they don't read that. Are we just going to keep adding to the Constitution?"

"Out of respect for my gay male readers, I'll resist the temptation to characterize this ruling as "shoving gay marriage down our throats.""

"You would think there were "Straights Only" water fountains the way Democrats carry on so (as if any gay man would drink nonbottled water)"

"Then there are the 22 million Americans on food stamps. And of course there are the 39 million greedy geezers collecting Social Security. The greatest generation rewarded itself with a pretty big meal."

"Whenever a liberal begins a statement with "I don't know which is more frightening," you know the answer is going to be pretty clear."

"While consistently rooting against America, liberals have used a fictional event forged of their own hysteria — "McCarthyism" — to prevent Americans from ever asking the simple question: Do liberals love their country?"

"Liberals chose Man. Conservatives chose God."

"The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't cowering in fear during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis."

""McCarthyism" means pointing out positions taken by liberals that are unpopular with the American people. As former President Bush said, "Liberals do not like me talking about liberals." The reason they sob about the dark night of fascism under McCarthy is to prevent Americans from ever noticing that liberals consistently attack their own country."

"Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason."

"Ozzy Osbourne has his bats, and I have that darn "convert them to Christianity" quote. Some may not like what I said, but I'm still waiting to hear a better suggestion."

"One hundred percent of terrorist attacks on commercial airlines based in America for 20 years have been committed by Muslims. When there is a 100 percent chance, it ceases to be a profile. It's called a 'description of the suspect.'"

"Conservatives believe man was created in God's image, while liberals believe they are gods. All of the behavioral tics of the liberals proceed from their godless belief that they can murder the unborn because they, the liberals, are themselves gods. They try to forcibly create "equality" through affirmative action and wealth redistribution because they are gods. They flat-out lie, with no higher power to constrain them, because they are gods. They adore pornography and the mechanization of sex because man is just an animal, and they are gods. They revere the U.N. and not the U.S. because they aren't Americans — they are gods."

"The Episcopals don't demand much in the way of actual religious belief. They have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages — it's much like The New York Times editorial board. They acknowledge the Ten Commandments — or "Moses' talking points" — but hasten to add that they're not exactly "carved in stone.""

"All the Democrats are for higher taxes. All of them are in favor of Hillary's socialist health-care plan. All of them are for higher pay for teachers and nurses — and no pay at all for anyone in the pharmaceutical or oil industries, especially Halliburton executives, who should be sent to Guantánamo. All the Democrats believe the way to strike fear in the hearts of the terrorists is for the federal government to invest heavily in windmills. All the Democrats oppose the war. And all the Democrats who took a position on the war before it began were for it, but now believe that everything Bush did from that moment forward has been bad! bad! bad! … Finally, all the candidates are willing to sell out any of these other issues in service of the one burning desire of all Democrats: abortion on demand. If they could just figure out a way to abort babies using solar power, that's all we'd ever hear about."

"Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed")."

"I think the other point that no one is making about the abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation. I mean, this is lesson, you know, number 1,000,047 on why women shouldn't be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious."

"USA Today doesn't like my "tone," humor, sarcasm, etc. etc., which raises the intriguing question of why they hired me to write for them in the first place. Perhaps they thought they were getting Catherine Coulter."

"Here at the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston, conservatives are deploying a series of covert signals to identify one another, much like gay men do. My allies are the ones wearing crosses or American flags. The people sporting shirts emblazened with the "F-word" are my opponents. Also, as always, the pretty girls and cops are on my side, most of them barely able to conceal their eye-rolling."

"When we were fighting communism, OK, they had mass murderers and gulags, but they were white men and they were sane. Now we're up against absolutely insane savages."

"[Learning difficulties are a cover for] rich parents with dumb kids...That's why 'Pinch' Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, is alleged to have dyslexia — because he's retarded."

"What are the odds that Dan Rather would have accepted such patently phony documents from, say, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?"

"Vester: You say you'd rather not talk to liberals at all? Coulter: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days."

"If Gore had been elected president, right now he would just be finding that last lesbian quadriplegic for the Special Forces team."

"A couple alleged males attempted to sucker punch a 100-pound woman and missed. And they ended up with their faces smashed in and spending the night in the Pima County Jail, where I'm sure — being good liberals — their views on gay marriage will serve them well."

"When you're allowed to exist on the same continent of the United States of America, protecting you with a nuclear shield around you, you're polite and you support us when we've been attacked on our own soil. They violated that protocol. … They better hope the United States doesn't roll over one night and crush them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent."

"Since liberals never print retractions, they can say anything. What they said in the past is always deemed inadmissible and unfair to quote."

"We'll drive off the side of that bridge when we come to it, Senator Kennedy."

"The only standard journalists respect is: Will this story promote the left-wing agenda?"

"The Times was rushing to assure its readers that "prominent Islamic scholars and theologians in the West say unequivocally that nothing in Islam countenances the Sept. 11 actions." (That's if you set aside Muhammad's many specific instructions to kill nonbelievers whenever possible)."

"Like the Democrats, Playboy just wants to liberate women to behave like pigs, have sex without consequences, prance about naked, and abort children."

"I'm getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties. I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning."

"Well, he was a very good rapist. I think that should not be forgotten."

"Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president."

"Would that it were so! … That the American military were targeting journalists."

"Newsweek couldn't wait a moment to run a story that predictably ginned up Islamic savages into murderous riots in Afghanistan, leaving hundreds injured and 16 dead. Who could have seen that coming? These are people who stone rape victims to death because the family "honor" has been violated and who fly planes into American skyscrapers because — wait, why did they do that again? Come to think of it, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to hold Newsweek responsible for inciting violence among people who view ancient Buddhist statues as outrageous provocation — though I was really looking forward to finally agreeing with Islamic loonies about something. (Bumper sticker idea for liberals: News magazines don't kill people, Muslims do.)"

"Harriet Miers isn't qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on The West Wing, let alone to be a real one."

"We've been waiting 30 years to end the lunacy of nine demigods on the Supreme Court deciding every burning social issue of the day for us, loyal subjects in a judicial theocracy. We don't want someone who will decide those issues for us — but decide them "our" way. If we did, a White House bureaucrat with good horse sense might be just the ticket."

"We've gone from a representative democracy to a monarchy, and the most appalling thing is – even conservatives just hope like the dickens the next king is a good one."

"The Democrats complain about the Republican base being nuts … The nuts are their entire party … They're always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them. … Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment."

"The Democrats are giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats' behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle. They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors."

"I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo. But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9-11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief. With a huge gaping hole in lower Manhattan, I'm not sure why we have to keep reminding people, but we are at war. (Perhaps it's because of the media blackout on images of the 9-11 attack. We're not allowed to see those because seeing planes plowing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might make us feel angry and jingoistic.) Among the things that war entails are: killing people (sometimes innocent), destroying buildings (sometimes innocent) and spying on people (sometimes innocent). That is why war is a bad thing. But once a war starts, it is going to be finished one way or another, and I have a preference for it coming out one way rather than the other."

"While taking the "best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism" -- which one assumes would exclude the forced abortions, imprisonment for homosexuals and forced labor"

"In the history of the nation, there has never been a political party so ridiculous as today's Democrats. It's as if all the brain-damaged people in America got together and formed a voting bloc."

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens's creme brulee. That's just a joke, for you in the media."

"We didn't raise this issue, the courts raised it. The courts jammed it down our throats, at the risk of insulting any of my gay male fans."

"Three cartoons made political points. One showed Muhammad turning away suicide bombers from the gates of heaven, saying "Stop, stop — we ran out of virgins!" — which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. Another was a cartoon of Muhammad with horns, which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. The third showed Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, which I believe was an expression of post-industrial ennui in a secular — oops, no, wait: It was more of a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence. Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back."

"I think our motto should be, post-9-11, "raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.""

"You know, OK, I made a few jokes — and they killed 3000 Americans. Fair trade."

"The amazing part of the great Danish cartoon caper isn't that Muslims immediately engage in acts of mob violence when things don't go their way. That is de rigueur for the Religion of Peace. Their immediate response to all bad news is mass violence. That's a "dog bites man" story and belongs on page B-34, next to the grade school hot lunch menu and the birth notices. After an Egyptian ferry capsized recently, killing hundreds of passengers, a whole braying mob of passengers' relatives staged an organized attack on the company, throwing furniture out the window and burning the building to the ground. Witnesses say it was the most violent ocean liner-related incident since Carnival Cruise Lines fired Kathie Lee Gifford. The "offense to Islam" ruse is merely an excuse for Muslims to revert to their default mode: rioting and setting things on fire."

"Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age and then permanently disarming Iran."

"You don't want the Republicans in power, does that mean you want a dictatorship, gay boy?"

"Is the idea of gay cowboys really that new? Didn’t the Village People do that a couple of decades ago? Am I the only person who saw John Travolta in “Urban Cowboy”? Movies with the same groundbreaking theme to come: — “Westward Homo!” — “The Magnificent, Fabulous Seven” — “Gunfight at the K-Y Corral” — “How West Hollywood Was Won”"

"I'd build a wall. In fact, I'd hire illegal immigrants to build the wall. And throw out the illegals who are here. … It's cheap labor."

"But as for bath houses versus marriage, there‘s nothing that prevents gays in being in lifelong committed relationships. The point of—the reason I think so many Americans, I suppose, including myself, have reacted so badly to courts announcing, you know, discovering rights to gay marriage in the Massachusetts constitution is that there should be benefits."

"The tolerant liberal suddenly becomes very intolerant when their official religion is challenged."

"Liberals have managed to eliminate the idea of manly honor. Instead, all they have is womanly indignation."

"I really liked Deadheads and the whole Dead concert scene: the tailgating, the tie-dye uniforms, the camaraderie — it was like NASCAR for potheads."

"The greatest threat to the war on terrorism isn't the Islamic insurgency — our military can handle the savages. It's traitorous liberals trying to lose the war at home."

"I don't know if he's gay. But Al Gore — total fag."

"I decided that I might adopt that as my new position on gay marriage, that I'm not against gay marriage. I'm just against gay divorce. We should have a constitutional amendment prohibiting them from getting divorced. Because I think we need to protect the sanctity of divorce."

"As for catching Osama, it's irrelevant. Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan."

"It was this idea (Be nice!) that fueled liberals' rage at Reagan when he vanquished the Soviet Union with his macho "cowboy diplomacy" that was going to get us all blown up. As the Times editorial page hysterically described Reagan's first year in office: "Mr. Reagan looked at the world through gun sights." Yes, he did! And now the Evil Empire is no more."

"Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether."

"Canada has become trouble recently … It’s always the worst Americans who go there … We could have taken them over so easy. But I only want the western part, with the ski areas, the cowboys, and the right wingers. They’re the only good parts of Canada."

"Democrats cannot conceive of "hate speech" towards Christians because, in their eyes, Christians always deserve it."

"Our book is Genesis. Their book is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the original environmental hoax."

"We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers' raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don't make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching tomorrow's future or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren't they too stupid to be teaching our kids?"

"I'm here, I'm not queer, and I'm not going away."

"These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much."

"Slander was about liberals’ methods, Treason was about the political consequences of liberalism, and Godless is about the underlying mental disease that creates liberalism."

"Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy — you know, all the virtues in the church of liberalism."

"I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs."

"Enjoy most: the prospect of having an impact on the public debate. Irritating liberals is a close second."

"Girl-power feminists who got where they are by marrying men with money or power — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Arianna Huffington and John Kerry — love to complain about how hard it is for a woman to be taken seriously. It has nothing to do with their being women. It has to do with their cheap paths to power. Kevin Federline isn't taken seriously either."

"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot", so I — so kind of an impasse — can't really talk about Edwards."

"And of course, if you're working for a Republican candidate, you'll meet some nice heterosexual guys. By the way, before I let that slide, I do want to point out one thing that has been driving me crazy with the media, how they keep describing Mitt Romney's position as being “pro-gays, and that's going to upset right-wingers.” Well, you know, screw you, I'm not anti-gay. We're against gay marriage. I don't want gays to be discriminated against. I mean, I think we have, in addition to blacks, I don't know why all gays aren't Republicans. I think we have the pro-gay position, which is anti-crime and for tax cuts. Gays make a lot of money, and they're victims of crime. I mean, the way -- no, they are. They should be with us. But the media portrays us. If they could get away with it, they would start saying, you know, “Mitt Romney, he's pro-civil rights, and that's going to upset conservatives.” No. OK. Sorry, go ahead."

"The only place Al Gore conserves energy these days is on the treadmill. I don't want to suggest that Al's getting big, but the last time I saw him on TV I thought, "That reminds me — we have to do something about saving the polar bears." Never mind his carbon footprint — have you seen the size of Al Gore's regular footprint lately? It's almost as deep as Janet Reno's."

"These people can't even wrap up genocide. We've been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever — and they still haven't finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It's like genocide by committee. Who's running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA? This is truly a war in which we have absolutely no interest. But liberals want our boys to go fight scimitar-wielding dervishes."

"One more item for the delusional Miss Grundys still obtusely citing Reagan as their model of "niceness": As governor of California, Reagan gave student protesters at Berkeley the finger. Remember that next time you ask yourself: "What would Reagan do?" People who are afraid of ideas whitewash Reagan like they whitewash Jesus. Sorry to break it to you, but the Reagan era did not consist of eight years of Reagan joking about his naps."

"If Imus had called me a "towheaded ho" or Al Sharpton a "nappy-headed ho," it would be what's known as "funny." (And if he called Anna Nicole Smith a "flaxen-headed ho," it would be "absolutely accurate.") But he attacked the looks and morals of utterly innocent women, who had done nothing to inject themselves into public debate. Imus should apologize to the Rutgers women — and those women alone — send them flowers, and stop kissing Al Sharpton's ring. This wasn't an insult to all mankind, and certainly not an insult to Al Sharpton. Now, if Imus had called the basketball players "fat, race-baiting black men with clownish hairstyles," well, then perhaps Sharpton would be owed an apology."

"From the attacks of 9/11 to Monday's school shooting, after every mass murder there is an overwhelming urge to "do something" to prevent a similar attack. But since Adam ate the apple and let evil into the world, deranged individuals have existed. Most of the time they can't be locked up until it's too late. It's not against the law to be crazy — in some jurisdictions it actually makes you more viable as a candidate for public office."

"Apparently, even crazy people prefer targets that can't shoot back. The reason schools are consistently popular targets for mass murderers is precisely because of all the idiotic "Gun-Free School Zone" laws. From the people who brought you "zero tolerance," I present the Gun-Free Zone! Yippee! Problem solved! Bam! Bam! Everybody down! Hey, how did that deranged loner get a gun into this Gun-Free Zone?"

"The not-visibly-insane Democrats all claim they'll get rough with the terrorists, but they can't even face Brit Hume. In case you missed this profile in Democrat machismo, the Democratic presidential candidates are refusing to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News Channel because the hosts are "biased." But they'll face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! At this, even Hillary Clinton was thinking, "Come on, guys — let's grow a pair.""

"The "European Union" happens to be composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon.org-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims."

"In fairness to Edwards, asking a trial lawyer to name his favorite moral leader is like asking the president of Iran to name his favorite Jew. (Answer: George Soros.) If you're keeping score, that's two major religions the Democrats lack a working knowledge of — Christianity and Islam."

"In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner. One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population."

"Maybe we could fight the war a little harder and not keep responding to Amnesty International... I don't think we even need more troops. I think we need to be less worried about civilian casualties. I mean, are the terrorists—are Islamic terrorists a more frightening enemy than the Nazis war machine? I don't think so. Fanatics can be stopped. Japanese kamikaze bombers—you can stop them by bombing their society. We killed more people in two nights over Hamburg than we have in the entire course of the Iraq war. … You can destroy the fighting spirit of fanatics. We've done it before. We know how to do it. And it's not by fighting a clean little hygienic war. … That was not a clean, hygienic war, World War Two. We killed a lot of civilians, and we crushed the Nazi war machine. And the idea that Nazism, which was tied to a civilized culture, was less of a threat than the Koran, tied to a Stone Age culture, I think is preposterous! If we want to win this war, we absolutely could. And I think we've been too nice so far. … We have liberals in this country screaming bloody murder about how we treat terrorists captured who are at Guantanamo, whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is being water-boarded... If this is a country that is worried about that—and I don't think it is—then we may as well give up right now. … Democracies don't like to go to war, so we're going to have to wrap it up quickly and destroy the fighting spirit of the fanatics."

"So for those of you who haven't read any of my five best-selling books: Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly."

"Edwards is like a politician who keeps announcing that he will not use his opponent's criminal record for partisan political advantage. Manifestly, I was not making fun of their son's death; I was making fun of John Edwards' incredibly creepy habit of invoking his son's tragic death to advance his political career — a practice so repellant, it even made John Kerry queasy. I'm a little tired of losers trying to raise campaign cash or TV ratings off of my coattails, particularly when they use their afflictions or bereavement schedules to try to silence the opposition."

"For six years, the Bush administration has kept America safe from another terrorist attack, allowing the Democrats to claim that the war on terrorism is a fraud, a "bumper sticker," a sneaky ploy by a power-mad president to create an apocryphal enemy so he could spy on innocent librarians in Wisconsin. And that's the view of the moderate Democrats. The rest of them think Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks."

"In anticipation of their surrender strategy becoming substantially less popular in the wake of another terrorist attack, the Democrats are all claiming that the threat of terrorism was nonexistent — notwithstanding 9/11, the Cole bombing, the bombing of our embassies, the bombing of the World Trade Center, the Achille Lauro, etc. etc. — until George Bush invaded Iraq."

"B. Hussein Obama said he was for slavery reparations in many forms, but the only one that got applause was for more "investment" in schools. In Obama's defense, the precise question was: "But is African-Americans ever going to get reparations for slavery?" So a switch to the subject of education was only natural. Moreover, a question on reparations has got to be confusing when you're half-white and half-black. What do you do? Demand an apology for slavery and money from yourself? I guess biracial reparations would involve sending yourself money, then sending back a portion of that money to yourself, minus 50 percent in processing fees — which is the same way federal aid works."

"And why is it "homophobic" for Senate Republicans to look askance at sex in public bathrooms? Is the Times claiming that sodomy in public bathrooms is the essence of being gay? I thought gays just wanted to get married to one another and settle down in the suburbs so they could visit each other in the hospital."

"Now our forces are killing lots of al-Qaida jihadists, preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and giving democracy in Iraq a chance — and Democrats say we are "losing" this war. I think that's a direct quote from their leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, but it may have been the Osama bin Laden tape released this week. I always get those two confused. OK, they knew what Petraeus was going to say. But we knew what the Democrats were going to say. If liberals are not traitors, their only fallback argument at this point is that they're really stupid."

"Liberals are hopping mad because Rush Limbaugh referred to phony soldiers as "phony soldiers." They claim he was accusing all Democrats in the military of being "phony." True, all Democrats in the military are not phony soldiers, but all phony soldiers seem to be Democrats."

"If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women."

"We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. … That's what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. ...That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews. We believe the Old Testament. As you know from the Old Testament, God was constantly getting fed up with humans for not being able to live up to all the laws. What Christians believe — this is just a statement of what the New Testament is — is that that's why Christ came and died for our sins. Christians believe the Old Testament. You don't believe our testament."

"Ironically, for all of their love of conspiracy theories — the rigging of the 2000 election, vote suppression in Ohio in 2004, 9/11 being an inside job, oil companies covering up miracle technology that would allow cars to run on dirt, Britney Spears' career, etc., etc. — when presented with an actual conspiracy of Soviet spies infiltrating the U.S. government, they laughed it off like world-weary skeptics and dedicated themselves to slandering Joe McCarthy. Then as now, liberals protect themselves from detection with wild calumnies against anybody who opposes them. They have no interest in — or aptitude for — persuasion. Their goal is to anathematize their enemies."

"Uttering lines that send liberals into paroxysms of rage, otherwise known as "citing facts," is the spice of life."

"I'm a Christian first, and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it."

"The Democratic Party supports criminals and Islamic terrorists but has no sympathy for taxpayers."

"If you're looking at substance rather than whether it's an R or D after his name, manifestly, if he's our candidate, then Hillary's gonna be our girl, Sean, because she's more conservative than he is. I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism. I absolutely believe that. … I will campaign for her if it's McCain."

"The man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents."

"Victim of a crime? Thank a single mother."

"I wouldn't kill an abortionist myself, but I wouldn't want to impose my moral values on others. No one is for shooting abortionists. But how will criminalizing men making difficult, often tragic, decisions be an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the shootings of abortionists?"

"Coulter: Every presidential assassination or attempted presidential assassination was committed by some sort of left-wing loon, communist, anarchist, communitarians, yes they were or they had no politics at all. Behar: The homegrown terrorists are also another group we have to worry about here. Coulter: Okay but they're all liberals."

"Now that the provost has instructed me on the criminal speech laws he apparently believes I have a proclivity (to break), despite knowing nothing about my speech, I see that he is guilty of promoting hatred against an identifiable group: conservatives. The provost simply believes and is publicizing his belief that conservatives are more likely to commit hate crimes in their speeches. Not only does this promote hatred against conservatives, but it promotes violence against conservatives."

"Take a camel."

"The Democrats compare their new health care bill to entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. But those are welfare, not health care. They may go to deserving welfare recipients, but they are a government-enforced gift from the young to the old (Medicare), and from the middle class to the poor (Medicaid). … These programs will have to be reconfigured at some point, but how society takes care of the old and the poor should be put in a separate box from how the non-elderly and non-poor should obtain health care. Democrats want to turn the entire citizenry into welfare recipients."

"The nonsense about President Obama being a Muslim has got to stop. I rise to defend him from this absurd accusation by pointing out that he is obviously an atheist."

"I’m pretty sure little François A-Houle does not need to travel with a bodyguard. I would like to know when this sort of violence, this sort of protest, has been inflicted upon a Muslim — who appear to be, from what I’ve read of the human rights complaints, the only protected group in Canada. I think I’ll give my speech tomorrow night in a burqa. That will protect me."

"It confirms my idea that you also need more liberal gun laws. Guns lead to a polite society, as we like to say in the United States. And I think that all of western Canada would agree with me."

"As we have learned from ObamaCare, young people are not considered adults until age 26, at which point they are finally forced to get off their parents' health care plans. The old motto was "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote." The new motto is: "Not old enough to buy your own health insurance, not old enough to vote.""

"Brain research in the last five years at Dartmouth and elsewhere has shown that human brains are not fully developed until age 25 and are particularly deficient in their frontal lobes, which control decision-making, rational thinking, judgment, the ability to plan ahead and to resist impulses. Unfortunately, we didn't know that in 1971. Those of you who have made it to age 26 without dying in a stupid drinking game — and I think congratulations are in order, by the way — understand how insane it is to allow young people to vote."

"True, Reagan tied with Carter for the youth vote in 1980 and stole younger voters from Mondale in 1984, but other than that, young voters have consistently embarrassed themselves. Of course, back when Reagan was running for president, young voters consisted of the one slice of the population completely uninfected by the Worst Generation. Today's youth are the infantilized, pampered, bicycle-helmeted children of the Worst Generation. They foisted this jug-eared, European socialist on us and now they must be punished. Voters aged 18 to 29 years old comprised nearly a fifth of the voting population in 2008 and they voted overwhelmingly for Obama, 66 percent to 31 percent."

"On the day of the Arizona massacre, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva blamed the "Palin express." The father of Gabrielle Giffords, one of the victims, blamed "the whole Tea Party." The sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, who had failed to lock Loughner up despite repeated arrests and other contacts, blamed "the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.""

"If we're looking for a rationale other than "Loughner was nuts," I think the more relevant facts about him are that he was an atheist who detested religion and religious people, made lots of references to satanic New Age "conscience dreaming" (sic) and was involved in the occult. When a fellow participant on a UFO website wrote a lengthy response to Loughner's question about "what is wrong or right with the current date?" which included the subordinate clause, "a day in Christ is as a thousand years," Loughner fixated on that one line, railing, "I won't listen to that fictitious crap without the author. This is laughable to notice a gospel or writing related to Christ.""

"The national Log Cabin Republicans are ridiculous. They’re not conservative at all. I don’t even think they’re gay — they’re bi (partisan). GOProud is comprised of real conservatives who happen to be gay. (Same with the Texas LCRs, for whom I’ve been signing books for years.)"

"A small item but the point is Nixon came in, shut it down, there was the shooting at Kent State, and gosh, I know liberals don't like it and when you look on Nexis and oh, the whole country was embarrassed. Well, I'm not embarrassed. That's what you do with a mob. They were monstrous at Kent State. It was being led by Bill Ayers."

"So I think all gays who are born gay are overwhelming conservative, maybe apolitical, and all those angry gays, causing trouble for everybody, I don't think they were born gay. I think they are just angry at their fathers."

"Eric Bolling: "Corporate personhood", "demolition of capitalism", "if we learn to share, we can all live in prosperity." What do you make of all this, Ann? Ann Coulter: All of those quotes could have been said in 1789 France before the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution or — with only slight modification — when the Nazis were coming to power. Cuba under Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela - This is always the beginning of totalitarianism. Eric Bolling: Are you sure, Ann, though- are you sure they couldn't also be found behind one of Obama's economic cabinet meetings? Ann Coulter: Well, yes! Thus the point of my book, bringing together all of these mob uprisings with the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party looooves mob uprisings. It's their path to power. And, you know, they always assume the mob leaders will remain mob leaders, and not end up like Maximilien Robespierre, beheaded a couple years after the revolution began. That is often the way the revolutions go."

"Gays have got to be pro-life. As soon as they find the gay gene, guess who the liberal yuppies are going to start aborting."

"It’s strange that Santorum doesn’t seem to understand the crucial state-federal divide bequeathed to us by the framers of our Constitution, inasmuch as it is precisely that difference that underlies his own point that states could ban contraception if they wanted to. Of course they can. States could outlaw purple hats, pogo sticks or Gummi bears under our Constitution! We rarely see such silly state laws because the people don’t want them. But the Constitution written by James Madison, et al, does not prevent a state’s elected representatives from enacting them."

"The Constitution mostly places limits on what the federal government can do. Only in a few instances does it restrict what states can do. Even a state cannot, for example, infringe on the people’s right to bear arms or to engage in the free exercise of religion. A state can’t send a senator to the U.S. Congress if he is under 30 years old. But except for a few instances like these, the Constitution leaves states free to govern themselves as they see fit."

"In New York City, they can have live sex clubs and abortion on demand, but no salt or smoking sections in restaurants. Nothing in the Constitution protects your right to smoke. In Tennessee, they can ban abortion, but have salt, creches and 80 mph highways. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work."

"Gay marriage has been on the ballot in ,um, three dozen, more than three dozen states. Every state when the people are allowed to vote have rejected it, including this state (California), including Maine, including Oregon. I've spent far too long and that is because, someday you will understand this young man, that is because when you get older and when you have property and you have interests. I mean everyone asks "Oh people - things are changing and people." No young people are always stupid. I love you, but you don't - you don't understand what creates a civilization and I will recommend to all of you a book I'm reading now, Charles Murray's Coming Apart. It will knock your socks off and mildly depress you, but part of one of the chapters is, million books who say the same thing, the - the linchpin of civilization is mother and father, married to one other. Not cohabitating partners."

"So for now I'd like gays to just be part of conservatism, just like women are, just like blacks are, without a special designation."

"There is something to being gay apart from the sodomy."

"Gays are national conservatives."

"Mostly, in this country, it is homosexual behavior. By the way, I'm not the one who wants to do anything about it. I'm just saying, if the argument is "smoking well we all got to pay"; sodomy we all have to pay. Your the one making the argument, fine go again have your bathhouses. Have at it."

"No, she's anti-bathhouse. You have to crack down on sodomy."

"They have a problem with unmarried women who think, "No, we don't need national defense, we need our birth control paid for." And why? Because single women look at the government as their husbands. "Please provide for me, please take care of me.""

"I don’t care if she knew about this. She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab."

"if you pass amnesty, that's it. It's over. Then we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America."

"If you don't want to be killed by ISIS, don't go to Syria. If you don't want to be killed by a Mexican, there's nothing I can tell you."

"ISIS is not at our doorstep. Illegal immigrants are not only at our doorstep, but millions of them are already through the door, murdering far more Americans than ISIS ever will."

"This Bruce Jenner still has Y chromosomes in every cell of his body. Do not tell me he is a girl. And I’ve checked with all my gay friends and they all say if he didn’t cut it off, he’s still a man."

"If it's real, it is a mental illness and I don't think we should be celebrating and laughing about it."

"Well OK, if you want to call it emotional. I’m just saying how ever you want to categorize, it I don’t think its much different from the black woman in the psych ward. I don’t think it is different from an Anorexics who is already terribly thin looking in a mirror and thinking, ‘I feel fat.’ Yes they really feel that way, but they aren’t. Bruce Jenner is not a woman. Every cell in his body is the cell of a man."

"Christian America, religious America I should say — the same thing is true of Orthodox Jews and conservative Jews, although that is a very small percentage of the population — religious America is reproducing well above replacement rate, it’s liberals who are aborting and going gay and anyone with a flair for color, so I think we will have a leg-up in the demographic war, that’s what the left was facing, that they weren’t reproducing enough so they had to bring in the ringers from the Third World to vote for them."

"Don't want terrorism in US? Stop importing Muslims!"

"It can be difficult to discuss America’s immigration policies when it’s considered racist merely to say, ‘We liked America the way it was.""

"We turn away astrophysicists in order to make room for illiterate Afghan peasants who will drop out of high school to man coffee carts until deciding to engage in jihad against us."

"Only in the case of immigration is the public systematically lied to from every major news outlet. The media lie about everything, but immigration constitutes their finest hour of collective lying."

"We're always told that we need to amnesty illegals to shore up Social Security. How, exactly, are people who make so little money that they don't pay income taxes going to save Social Security?"

"The British Empire spread Anglo-Saxon culture around the globe–Protestant morals, individualism, the rule of law. Most British colonies rejected those values. Only the ones populated by actual British people–America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand–managed to hold on to them and, as a result, prospered."

"America should be choosing immigrants the way the New England Patriots choose players. They don’t have a lottery system for their draft picks. No one guilts them into taking a blind kid with one leg over an All American–much less the blind kid’s cousin, to keep him company."

"The main difference between decapitations in Syria and Mexico is that Mexicans also behead women, children, and innocent bystanders. In addition to pioneering videotaped beheadings, Mexicans specialize in corpse desecration, burning people alive, rolling human heads onto packed nightclub dance floors, dissolving bodies in acid, and hanging mutilated bodies from bridges. Why are the media obsessed with ISIS’s beheadings but not the more frequent head-chopping right next door?"

"Israel says, quite correctly, that changing Israel’s ethnicity would change the idea of Israel. Well, changing America’s ethnicity changes the idea of America, too. Show me in a straight line why we can’t do what Israel does. Is Israel special? For some of us, America is special, too."

"By unapologetically opposing the transformation of America into a Third World country, the GOP would sweep the white vote–once white people recovered from the shock of any candidate asking for their vote. Why should Republicans be ashamed of getting white votes? How about the party work on getting more of them?"

"Democrats denounce and abuse white people, and Republicans act embarrassed about having whites vote for them."

"The billion-dollar immigration industry has turned every single aspect of immigration law into an engine of fraud. The family reunifications are frauds, the ‘farmworkers’ are frauds, the high-tech visas are frauds–and the asylum and refugee cases are monumental frauds."

"It's not that transgender people are going to go and molest children. It's that once you say men can go into women's bathrooms — men who are out shopping with their little daughters and don't have mommy to bring her in there. It's not that the trans are going to molest them, it's that a child molester now has the right to go into that bathroom."

"Khizr Khan, the Muslim "Gold Star Father" who harangued Americans at the Democratic National Convention, with a mute, hijab-wearing wife at his side, is just another in a long string of human shields liberals send out to defend their heinous policies. ... Does anyone know what Khan thinks of gays? How about miniskirts? Alcohol? Because I gather we're going to have to turn all our policies over to him, too. What have you sacrificed, Barney Frank??"

"Trump (Donald) denied knowing that Serge (Kovaleski) was disabled, and demanded an apology, saying that anyone could see his imitation was of a flustered, frightened reporter, not a disabled person. It’s true that Trump was not mimicking any mannerisms that Serge has. He doesn’t jerk around or flail his arms. He’s not retarded. He sits calmly, but if you look at his wrists, you’ll see they are curved in. That’s not the imitation Trump was doing—he was doing a standard retard, waving his arms and sounding stupid: “’Ahhh, I don’t know what I said—ahhh, I don’t remember!’ He’s going, ‘Ahhh, I don’t remember, maybe that’s what I said!’”"

"There's nothing Trump can do that won't be forgiven, except change his immigration policies."

"Everything that seems like a disability with Trump always turns out to be an advantage. If we were in the laboratory, designing the perfect presidential candidate, it’s unlikely we would have produced a tasteless, publicity‐seeking, coarse, billionaire, reality TV star. Ha! Look at how wrong we were. It turns out, that is exactly what we needed."

"The Trump candidacy puts Democrats in an extremely awkward position. They are the party of elegance and fabulosity, but also claim to be the party of the “blacks and browns”—who see absolutely nothing wrong with Trump’s taste. Jay Z and Beyoncé may not like Trump’s positions, but, boy, they like his style. They’re asking themselves, How can a person of such taste be a Republican? He’s P. Diddy in the Hamptons, disturbing the neighbors with his parties."

"The commentariat denounced Trump’s immigration policies, then quickly returned to saying he had no policies at all. It was as if JFK had said we were going to the moon and the entire media shouted back, “Okay, but what’s your policy on going to the moon.”"

"If you want a conservative country, you need a conservative populace. Immigration is changing the country, and there will be no changing it back. If you don’t understand that, you are the enemy of any conservative undertaking."

"Trump won because he was forcing the media and politicians to talk about real problems facing the country, not recycling the same bromides the GOP has been pushing for the past thirty years. Those may be okay ideas for another time, but not when the country is about to be permanently transformed into a new country, know as "California" where all those zippy Republican ideas have less chance of becoming law than the wish list of the Wicca online community."

"All those angry, uneducated Trump supporters seemed to understand what his policies were. They figured it out by listening to him. It was only fair. No one listened to Trump, except the voters; and no one listened to the voters, except Trump."

"Well, Milo learned HIS lesson. Pederasty acceptable only for refugees and illegals. Then libs will support you."

"On the bright side, maybe sending men in dresses into women's bathrooms will reduce number of women in our fighting forces."

"I was kinda torn on-on that. (Donald Trump's announcement he was banning transgender individuals from the US military) I know Congress was looking at it. So maybe he signed a bill they passed or something, but the upside is that the army was refusing to prohibit, you know, big hairy men from going into the ladies' locker room in the Marines, in the army. And I thought, "Well, you know, maybe finally this will cut down on girls in the marines.""

"In order to get the funding through for the wall, it was being held up by conservatives – or I would have thought, you know, sane humans – in the Senate who don’t want taxpayers like you and me paying for these lengthy transgender operations, years of therapy."

"I mean, for Pete’s sake, you can’t get into the military, or used to not be able to get into the military, who knows now, if you had asthma, psoriasis, attention deficit disorder, but we’re going to bring in people with an extremely peculiar and rare mental illness...and have the taxpayers pay for it."

"The only thing I'll say in defense of basically the entire conservative media is that, except for a few talk radio hosts, my twitter feed, I guess Brietbart, and Daily Caller is everyone seems to dislike Richard Spencer. He is you know our equivalent of Black Lives Matter. Apparently you know a gay showboater who just wants lots of media attention."

"I don't believe Hurricane Harvey is God's punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor. But that is more credible than "climate change.""

"This is the second chance to be a fellow that Chelsea Manning has blown"

"We’re about to see a genocide and if Trump doesn’t keep his promises on immigration, in about two generations that’s going to be the United States of America, so get used to it. But we are seeing a genocide there, and if we’re going to take any refugees it seems to me it ought to be particularly these white farmers who are being chosen and killed in really horrible ways,” she declared. “They’re not just going in and shooting them point blank, they’re really disgusting. They’re boiling people to death, just really sick tortures. They’re outnumbered, there aren’t that many of them, they’re going to be wiped out."

"Oh, and just one more point that a lot of Americans don’t know. We’re so used to, ‘Oh colonialism,’ no, the Boers, the ones who are there, were there before the Zulus, they got there first. The Zulus came down like a hundred years later. I mean we are witnessing a straight out genocide."

"Watching and wondering: Why does think aren't good enough to host a show on his network? MSNBC has done such a wonderful job spreading intersectionality to the rest of the world! Why no transgenders on their own network? [...] Which reminds me: Why does MSNBC put all its black hosts on the low-rated weekend ghetto? This must change!"

"Is there a political party for people who think Jan. 6 was dumb, notice that we don't have a wall, and can read an election report, but still say Bush is a male bimbo and pretty much everything liberals said about him was true?"

""Trumpism Without Trump" is the winning formula. We're keeping the policies, but getting rid of the 8-year-old."

"We know he had a lisp, wore eye liner, was aggressive toward girls, worked at Wendy's, played X-box, was a loner, was born in North Dakota, moved to TX and lived with grandmother. Why don't we know one thing about his parents?"

"[After Charlie Kirk had suggested all other Republican candidates should stand down in favor of Donald Trump] That’s nothing! I’m calling on EVERY REPUBLICAN TO COMMIT SUICIDE in solidarity with Trump!"

"We didn’t kill enough Indians."

"The media are in a dither, demanding to know who’s going to “run” Venezuela. The president should tell them, “Whomever the CIA chooses.”"

"She's a fascist Barbie doll!"

"Coulter writes that conservative books sell like hot cakes, conservative talk show hosts dominate the airwaves, and the public shows every indication of leaning to the right and has some hostility to liberals and their positions. This being true, why does almost half the electorate vote for the National Socialist Democrat party (NSDP), which is owned lock, stock and barrel by the Marxist left?"

"Meet Ann Coulter. In her opinion, "liberals are racists", the French are "a bunch of faggots", only property owners should be allowed to vote, and anyone who disagrees with her is a "fatuous idiot" or "evil". In liberal Europe, such propositions are seldom aired, even in the most right-wing salons. In America, however, Coulter — blonde, fortysomething — is a regular guest commentator on news and talk shows such as Good Morning America, Hannity and Colmes, At Large with Geraldo Rivera and The O'Reilly Factor."

"Why can't she say extremist Muslims rather than just Muslims? "If that'll make you happy. They slaughtered 3,000 people and I'm making unfair generalisations. I think we're even." Well, no, I don't think we're even, I begin to reply — and at this point I see a side of Ann Coulter that goes beyond the ludicrous opinions. I see someone who is not afraid to twist, distort, bully and lie in order to "win" her argument. Before I can elaborate or finish my sentence, she's off again. "Oh no, you're right, a generalisation is so much worse than slaughtering 3,000 people." I'm not saying that, I say. "I can't go beyond that, an ethnic generalisation is worse than slaughter. That is the essence of liberalism, you really do believe that. You get a glass of wine in you and you spit it out. You heard it. Making an un-PC generalisation is worse than the attack of 9/11." I'm not saying that, I repeat. "Yes, you are, you just said it." Of course I don't think that, I start, before I'm cut off again. "Liar!" The irony is that she claims to be above this kind of steamrolling. "The country is trapped in a political discourse that resembles professional wrestling," she has written. "Liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments." But her view of what constitutes an argument seems to be a distinctly one-sided affair. I try again: "Do you think I have any point at all about..." I begin, but she interrupts again. "No!" She doesn't even know what my point was."

"Is Ann Coulter a nutcase? If she is, she's one listened to and approved of by a frightening number of Americans. Surely, I say, hoping she will concede that she sometimes provokes to amuse, she doesn't believe everything she comes out with. "This is the shocking thing for your readers," she replies. "I believe everything I say.""

"I know a lot of the widows and family members who lost loved ones on 9/11. They never wanted to be a member of a group that is defined by the tragedy of what happened. I find it unimaginable that anyone in the public eye could launch a vicious, mean-spirited attack on people whom I’ve known over the last four and a half years to be concerned deeply about the safety and security of our country. Perhaps her book should have been called Heartless."

"I think Ann Coulter is getting exactly what she wants, which is attention. … I think Ann Coulter often has intriguing and provocative things to say about the clash between liberalism and conservatism. I think some of the stuff she said here is over the line, and I have a pretty high tolerance for this kind of stuff because I believe that the more we argue, the better we are as a country, but I think some of the personal comments were just over the line."

"It's the ugliness of the charge that she is making, the ugliness of the words that she's using that are drawing attention to her… But it's almost as if she's a figure in a circus. And you're saying, "Oh, my God. Can you believe that?"

"Ann Coulter has become a legend in her own mind."

"I guess I committed the sin of accurately quoting Ann's comments, which got her dumped by National Review, which is not exactly part of the liberal media conspiracy… But I still think Ann can be very funny."

"Certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don’t understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. But no matter how much you or I disagree with her, the cult that follows Coulter cannot be denied. She is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most notable female members of the Republican Party. She was one of the headliners at the recent CPAC conference (but when your competition is a teenager who has a dream about the Republican Party and Stephen Baldwin, it’s not really saying that much). Coulter could be the poster woman for the most extreme side of the Republican Party. And in some ways I could be the poster woman for the opposite. I consider myself a progressive Republican, but here is what I don’t get about Coulter: Is she for real or not? Are some of her statements just gimmicks to gain publicity for her books or does she actually believe the things she says? Does she really believe all Jewish people should be “perfected” and become Christians? And what was she thinking when she said Hillary Clinton was more conservative than my father during the last election? If you truly have the GOP’s best interests at heart, how can you possibly justify telling an audience of millions that a Democrat would be a better leader than the Republican presidential candidate? (I asked Ann for comment on this column, including many of the above questions, but she did not answer my request.)"

"If Ann Coulter is trying to persuade people to her view, the personal attack is foolish …. I think this kind of stuff does conservatives more harm than good, because it basically reinforces what the left is trying to sell, that the right is mean, out of control, and whatever other adjectives you want to put in there."

"We—"the free love generation"—are now telling our children to abstain from sex? When I spoke at Carleton College, I told the young people: "Unless they were a virgin on their wedding day, anyone who preaches abstinence to you is a hypocrite." Two weeks later, Ann Coulter showed up at the same school, and one of the students raised his hand and asked her whether she'd been a virgin! It made the papers—and made me laugh. You know what Coulter did? Attacked the kid and changed the subject."

"Well, less said about whom, the better."

"Phillips organized a night out, and Coulter told his gay friends she knew they really didn't want to get married--she knew they were more interested in promiscuous sex than in traditional family structures. In a view very similar to radical queers' opposition to gay marriage, Coulter argued that gay marriage would ruin gay culture, because gays value promiscuity over monogamy."

"Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms, To deck our girls for gay delights! The crimson flower of battle blooms, And solemn marches fill the nights."

"The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed, Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed: 'T was red with the blood of freemen and white with the fear of the foe; And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols know."

"What is the harvest of thy saints, O God! who dost abide? Where grow the garlands of thy chiefs In blood and sorrow dyed? What have thy servants for their pains?" "This only — to have tried."

"The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness."

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on."

"I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps, I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His Day is marching on."

"I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.""

"He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat. Oh! be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on."

"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on."

"He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave, He is wisdom to the mighty, he is succour to the brave, So the world shall be his footstool, and the soul of Time his slave, Our God is marching on."

"Arise then... women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts!"

"We, the women of one country, Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

"From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe our dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace..."

"In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality, May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions, The great and general interests of peace."

"I only hope you may be able not only to listen, but also to hear me. Your charity must multiply my small voice and do some such miracle as was done when the loaves and fishes fed the multitude in the ancient tune which has just been spoken of."

"Before I say anything on my own account, I want to take the word Christianity back to Christ himself, back to that mighty heart whose pulse seems to throb through the world to-day, that endless fountain of charity out of which I believe has come all true progress and all civilization that deserves the name. As a woman I do not wish to dwell upon any trait of exclusiveness in the letter which belongs to a time when such exclusiveness perhaps could not be helped, and which may have been put in where it was not expressed. I go back to that great Spirit which contemplated a sacrifice for the whole of humanity. That sacrifice is not one of exclusion, but of an infinite and endless and joyous inclusion. And I thank God for it."

"It has been extremely edifying to hear of the good theories of duty and morality and piety which the various religions advocate. I will put them all on one basis, Christian and Jewish and ethnic, which they all promulgate to mankind. But what I think we want now to do is to inquire why the practice of all nations, our own as well as any other, is so much at variance with these noble precepts? These great founders of religion have made the true sacrifice. They have taken a noble human life, full of every human longing and passion and power and aspiration, and they have taken it all to try and find out something about this question of what God meant man to be and does mean him to be. But while they have made this great sacrifice, how is it with the multitude of us? Are we making any sacrifice at all? We think it was very well that those heroic spirits should study, should agonize and bled for us. But what do we do?"

"I need not stand here to repeat any definition of what religion is. I think you will all say that it is aspiration, the pursuit of the divine in the human; the sacrifice of everything to duty for the sake of God and of humanity and of our own individual dignity."

"What is it that passes for religion? In some countries magic passes for religion, and that is one thing I wish, in view particularly of the ethnic faiths, could be made very prominent— that religion is not magic. I am very sure that in many countries it is supposed to be so. You do something that will bring you good luck. It is for the interests of the priesthood to cherish that idea. Of course the idea of advantage in this life and in another life is very strong, and rightly very strong in all human breasts. Therefore, it is for the advantage of the priesthoods to make it to be supposed that they have in their possession certain tricks, certain charms, which will give you either some particular prosperity in this world or possibly the privilege of immortal happiness. Now, this is not religion. This is most mischievous irreligion, and I think this Parliament should say, once for all, that the name of God and the names of his saints are not things to conjure with."

"I think nothing is religion which puts one individual absolutely above others, and surely nothing is religion which puts one sex above another. Religion is primarily our relation to the Supreme, to God himself. It is for him to judge; it is for him to say where we belong, who is highest and who is not; of that we know nothing. And any religion which will sacrifice a certain set of human beings for the enjoyment or aggrandizement or advantage of another is no religion. It is a thing which may be allowed, but it is against true religion. Any religion which sacrifices women to the brutality of men is no religion."

"From this Parliament let some valorous, new, strong, and courageous influence go forth, and let us have here an agreement of all faiths for one good end, for one good thing— really for the glory of God, really for the sake of humanity from all that is low and animal and unworthy and undivine."

"We returned to the city very slowly, of necessity, for the troops nearly filled the road. My dear minister was in the carriage with me, as were several other friends. To beguile the rather tedious drive, we sang from time to time snatches of the army songs so popular at that time, concluding, I think, with John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground; His soul is marching on. The soldiers seemed to like this, and answered back, "Good for you!" Mr. Clarke said, "Mrs. Howe, why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune?" I replied that I had often wished to do this, but had not as yet found in my mind any leading toward it. I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, "I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them." So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper. I had learned to do this when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me in the night, and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby, who slept near me. I was always obliged to decipher my scrawl before another night should intervene, as it was only legible while the matter was fresh in my mind. At this time, having completed the writing, I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, "I like this better than most things that I have written.""

"While the war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?" I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed."

"Have we lost our God ? Never for one moment. Unspeakable, He is; the beneficent parent, the terrible, incorruptible judge, the champion of the innocent, the accuser of the guilty, refuge, hope, redeemer, friend; neither palace walls nor prison cells can keep Him out. Every step of our way from the birth hour He has gone with us. Were we at the gallows' foot, and deservedly, He would leave a sweet drop in the cup of death. He would measure suffering to us, but would forbid despair. The victory of goodness must be complete. The lost sheep must be found — ay, and the lost soul must turn to the way in which the peace of God prevails. We learn the dreadful danger of those who wander from the right path, but we may also learn the redeeming power which recalls and reclaims them. So fade our heavens and hells. Christ, if he knew their secrets, did not betray them. On the boundless sea of conjecture we are still afloat, with such mental tools as we possess to guide us, with the skies, the stars, the seasons, seeking a harbor from which no voyager has ever returned."

"To me has been granted a somewhat unusual experience of life. Ninety full years have been measured off to me, their lessons and opportunities unabridged by wasting disease or gnawing poverty. I have enjoyed general good health, comfortable circumstances, excellent company, and the incitements to personal effort which civilized society offers to its members. For this life and its gifts I am, I hope, devoutly thankful. I came into this world a hopeless and ignorant bit of humanity. I have found in it many helps toward the attainment of my full human stature, material, mental, moral. In this slow process of attainment many features have proved transient. Visions have come and gone. Seasons have bloomed and closed, passions have flamed and faded. Something has never left me. My relation to it has suffered many changes, but it still remains, the foundation of my life, light in darkness, consolation in ill fortune, guide in uncertainty. In the nature of things, I must soon lose sight of this sense of constant metamorphosis whose limits bound our human life. How about this unchanging element? Will it die when I shall be laid in earth? The visible world has no answer to this question. For it, dead is dead, and gone is gone. But a deep spring of life within me says: "Look beyond. Thy days numbered hitherto register a divine promise. Thy mortal dissolution leaves this promise unfulfilled, but not abrogated. Thou mayst hope that all that made thy life divine will live for thine immortal part." I have quoted Theodore Parker's great word, and have made no attempt, so far, to bring into view considerations which may set before us the fundamental distinction between what in human experience passes and what abides."

"Life passes, but the conditions of life do not. Air, food, water, the moral sense, the mathematical problem and its solution. These things wait upon one generation much as they did upon its predecessor. What, too, is this wonderful residuum which refuses to disappear when the very features of time seem to succumb to the law of change, and we recognize our world no more ? Whence comes this system in which man walks as in an artificial frame, every weight and lever of which must correspond with the outlines of an eternal pattern? Our spiritual life appears to include three terms in one. They are ever with us, this Past which does not pass, this Future which never arrives. They are part and parcel of this conscious existence which we call Present. While Past and Future have each their seasons of predominance, both are contained in the moment which is gone while we say, "It is here." So the Eternal is with us, whether we will or not, and the idea of God is inseparable from the persuasion of immortality; the Being which, perfect in itself, can neither grow nor decline, nor indeed undergo any change whatever. The great Static of the universe, the rationale of the steadfast faith of believing souls, the sense of beauty which justifies our high enjoyments, the sense of proportion which upholds all that we can think about ourselves and our world, the sense of permanence which makes the child in very truth parent to the man, able to solve the deepest riddle, the profoundest problem in all that is. Let us then willingly take the Eternal with us in our flight among the suns and stars. Experience is our great teacher, and on this point it is wholly wanting. No one on the farther side of the great Divide has been able to inform those on the hither side of what lies beyond."

"The promise of a future life is held to have such prominence in Christ's teaching as to lead Paul to say that the Master "brought life and immortality to light." How did he do this? By filling the life of to-day with the consciousness of eternal things, of truths and principles which would not change if the whole visible universe were to pass away. No one to-day, I think, will maintain that Christ created the hope which he aroused to an activity before undreamed of. The majority of the Jews believed in a life after death, as is shown by the segregation of the Sadducees from the orthodox of the synagogue. The new teaching vindicated the spiritual rights and interests of man. From the depths of his own heart was evolved the consciousness of a good that could not die. Man, the creature of a day, has a vested interest in things eternal."

"The reason which placed the stars, the sense of proportion which we recognize in the planetary system, finds its correspondence in this brain of ours. We question every feature of what we see, think, and feel. We try every link of the chain and find it sound if we ourselves are sound. This power of remotest question and assent is not of to-day nor yesterday. It transcends all bounds of time and space. It weighs the sun, explores the pathway of the stars, and writes, having first carefully read, the history of earth and heaven. It moves in company with the immortals. How much of it is mortal? Only so much as a small strip of earth can cover. These remains are laid away with reverence, having served their time. But what has become of the wonderful power which made them alive ? It belongs to that in nature which cannot die."

"Here I am, in Quaker surroundings, whose restful simplicity is most congenial to me. I feel here the earnest desire for genuine growth and culture which founds a slow but sure success. I am confirmed in my division of human energies. Ambitious people climb, but faithful people build."

"I feel that I must attack this creed of blood, which does much to keep up the cruel and sanguinary views of barbarous ages about God and man. Will take text, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven." Show that Christ brought a new interest into the world; a new vision of God, the loving one; a new view of man, the hopeful and universal one; his death in its character the seal to his perfect life. But we are saved by his doctrine, by the same spirit which animated his life, — we are saved by his life, not by his death, except as it was the necessary moral sequence of his life."

"Charity is an unending self-discipline which always looks and leads towards the eternal affection. Therefore, its triumph shall be lasting and everlasting."

"We can teach no virtues we do not practice," occurred to me this afternoon; for without learning by experience how a virtue is acquired, how can we teach any one to acquire it? I thought of this in connection with the experience of undutiful children. By the working of this natural cause, they will not make their own children dutiful. Read in Luke of the angel which appeared to Christ in Gethsemane, strengthening Him. We all see this angel when we say truly, "Thy will, not mine, be done."

"There is no hell like that of a selfish heart, and there is no misfortune so great as that of not being able to make a sacrifice. These two thoughts come to me strongly this morning. It is something to have learned these truths so that we can never again doubt them."

"see how long Julia Ward Howe lived, and many other old ladies of whom I have read with delight in the American papers. How beautiful it is to see and hear an old woman of eighty or ninety addressing words of love and reason to the young generation!"

"Julia Ward Howe, although this was only discovered about ten years ago, wrote a novel about a hermaphrodite--a man/woman who loves both men and women--that most critics now think was her own meditation on her husband's bisexuality."

"The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence."

"You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now."

"I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war."

"Some Vietnam veterans have told me what they did over there when they were animals. They have been giving testimony about it to the public, to juries, to judges. Some of the juries cry, and so do some of the judges. One Ex-Marine has a face like a Puerto Rican angel and a body count of 390. That means he and his unit killed 390 people in a variety of hideous ways, and the angel got to go count the dead bodies for the record. And now he and a lot of his buddies are trying to make up for what we made them do. We paid the taxes that bought the war that hired the men and dropped the fire that burned the huts and killed the people who then were the bodies that Scott counted. It's a rotten thing to brainwash someone into doing the dirty part of killing while we stay at home. It's a rotten thing to pretend the war is coming to an end when it's only taken to the air. And in 1972 if you don't fight against a rotten thing you become a part of it. What I'm asking you to do is take some risks. Stop paying war taxes, refuse the armed forces, organize against the air war, support the strikes and boycotts of farmers, workers and poor people, analyze the flag salute, give up the nation state, share your money, refuse to hate, be willing to work … in short, sisters and brothers, arm up with love and come from the shadows."

"If we survive this century it will only be because you and I refuse to become Nazis."

"Bangladesh, Bangladesh When the sun sinks in the west Die a million people of the Bangladesh"

"The only thing you can do about memory is just be very humble about it because it may not have much to do with reality."

"(about Woodstock) I think it was fantastic. I think the only way its been overdone was thinking it changed the world, politically and as far as the war went. It was only a part of things. It wasn’t it."

"I’ve never taken much time to do nothing, which I think is pretty important, especially at my age, and sort of contemplating what is coming. In this culture, we spend most of our time trying to avoid it. I would like to have more of a Buddhist approach."

"We are left in the dust right now and I don’t know if disappointed is the word. I’d say “overwhelmed” because nobody back in the 1960s or 1970s could have imagined anything this fuckin’ awful."

"I just sing when I feel like singing, feels sort of like exploding."

"(If you could speak to your younger self, what would you tell her?) Take it easy. Take a break. Relax a little."

"I tend more towards Buddhist and Native American thought. For me, the spirits are quite real."

"Blessed are the persecuted And blessed are the pure in heart Blessed are the merciful And blessed are the ones who mourn"

"Against us is the law With its immensity of strength and power Against us is the law! Police know how to make a man A guilty or an innocent Against us is the power of police! The shameless lies that men have told Will ever more be paid in gold Against us is the power of the gold! Against us is racial hatred And the simple fact that we are poorMy father dear, I am a prisoner Don't be ashamed to tell my crime The crime of love and brotherhood And only silence is shame"

"Rebellion, revolution don't need dollars They need this instead Imagination, suffering, light and love And care for every human being You never steal, you never kill You are a part of hope and life The revolution goes from man to man And heart to heart And I sense when I look at the stars That we are children of life Death is small"

"Yes, your father and Bartolo They have fallen And yesterday they fought and fell But in the quest for joy and freedom And in the struggle of this life you'll find That there is love and sometimes more Yes, in the struggle you will find That you can love and be loved alsoForgive me all who are my friends I am with you I beg of you, do not cry"

"Here's to you, Nicola and Bart Rest forever here in our hearts The last and final moment is yours That agony is your triumph"

"We both know what memories can bring They bring diamonds and rust"

"Well you burst on the scene Already a legend The unwashed phenomenon The original vagabond You strayed into my arms And there you stayed Temporarily lost at sea The Madonna was yours for free Yes the girl on the half-shell Would keep you unharmed"

"Now you're telling me You're not nostalgic Then give me another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things vague Because I need some of that vagueness now It's all come back too clearly Yes I loved you dearly And if you're offering me diamonds and rust I've already paid"

"Miracles bowl me over And often will they do so Now I think I was asleep till I heard The voice of the great CarusoBring infinity home Let me embrace it one more time Make it the lilies of the field Or Caruso in his prime"

"With the precision of a hummingbird's heart Was the lord of the monarch butterflies One-time ruler of the world of art"

"True he was a vocal miracle But that's only secondary It's the soul of the monarch butterfly That I find a little bit scary"

"Perhaps he's just a vehicle To bear us to the hills of Truth That's Truth spelled with a great big T And peddled in the mystic's booth There are oh so many miracles That the western sky exposes Why go looking for lilacs When you're lying in a bed of roses?"

"We're the children of the 80's, haven't we grown We're tender as a lotus and we're tougher than stone And the age of our innocence is somewhere in the garden"

"Some of us may offer a surprise Recently have you looked in our eyes Maybe we're your conscience in disguise"

"We are the warriors of the sun The golden boys and the golden girls For a better world"

"I was born gifted. I can speak of my gifts with little or no modesty, but with tremendous gratitude, precisely because they are gifts, and not things which I created, or actions about which I might be proud. My greatest gift, given to me by forces which confound genetics, environment, race, or ambition, is a singing voice. My second greatest gift, without which I would be an entirely different person with an entirely different story to tell, is a desire to share that voice, and the bounties it has heaped upon me, with others. From that combination of gifts has developed an immeasurable wealth-a wealth of adventures, of friendships, and of plain joys. Over a period of nearly three decades I have sung from hundreds of concert stages, all over the world: Eastern and Western Europe, Japan, Australia, Northern Africa, South, Central, and North America, Canada, the Middle East, the Far East. I sang in the bomb shelters of Hanoi during the Vietnam War; in the Laotian refugee camps in Thailand; in the makeshift settlements of the boat people in Malaysia. I have had the privilege of meeting some extraordinary citizens of the world, both renowned and unsung: Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner; The Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, Mairead Corrigan in Belfast, Bertrand Russell, Cezar Chavez, Orlando Letelier; Bishop Tutu, Lech Walesa; Presidents Corazon Aquino, François Mitterrand, Jimmy Carter, and Giscard d'Estaing; the King of Sweden. Through Amnesty International I have met political prisoners who have endured repression and tortures under both right- and left-wing governments and who have astounded me with their humor, good cheer, and courage."

"Martin Luther King, Jr., more than any other public figure helped to solidify my ideas and inspired me to act upon them."

"My personal life has also been complicated-and public-though I am beginning to find more of a sense of peace and self-acceptance than I ever thought possible. Once I wanted to be married and have heaps of kids scrambling around me, licking cake mix off eggbeaters and riding Saint Bernards through the kitchen while I cooked stew over an open fire. Alas, those images bore no relation to my areas of competence, and since my marriage to David Harris dissolved in January of 1974 I have lived mainly alone, with occasional romantic interludes, the best of which are magical and splendidly impractical."

"My art, work, family and friends, my son Gabe, and a curious relationship with God remain the sustaining forces in my life."

"Through all these changes my social and political views have remained astoundingly steadfast. I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world."

"I am recording them for myself, to take a hard look back before facing forward in these most bizarre of times."

"I had an affair with a girl when I was twenty-two. It was wonderful. It happened, I assume, after an overdose of unhappiness at the end of an affair with a man, when I had a need for softness and understanding. I assume that the homosexuality within me, which people love to say is in all of us, made itself felt at that time, and saved me from becoming cold and bitter toward everyone. I slowly mended, and since the affair with Kimmie have not had another affair with a woman nor the conscious desire to."

"It seemed a miracle that I would meet, and have the blessing to know and work with, one of the two saints of the phenomenon which had won my heart when I was barely sixteen years old: the concept of radical nonviolence, introduced to the world as a revolutionary political tool by Mahatma Gandhi in India, and reintroduced now by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States of America."

"The first time I was in the South was in 1961. I was on a regular concert tour, and was barely aware of the civil rights movement, probably because I hadn't yet made the transition from Michael to the real world. I did discover, however, that no blacks were at any of my concerts, and would not have been allowed in if they had come. The following summer I wrote into the contract that I wouldn't sing unless blacks were admitted into the hall."

"There was a revolution going on all around us, and if a white businessman and his family wanted to hear me sing "Fair and Tender Maidens," they had to come and sit in this boiling hot room and integrate an audience."

"Of the many photographs I have of myself and famous people, there is one which I had framed and have never forgotten. It is of King and me at the head of that line of schoolchildren in Grenada, Mississippi. Ira is in back of me, and Andy, and then a long string of kids, all black."

"I have never been involved in the campaign of any major political candidate, preferring to work entirely outside of the party structure. Occasionally I have slipped a check and a note of encouragement to some brave congressperson who has defied everybody and risked his or her return to office because of principles."

"Seeing that nothing could come of our presence in Vietnam except disaster, I had a quiet revelation and decided to refuse to pay my military taxes."

"What I have to say is this: I do not believe in war. I do not believe in the weapons of war...I am not going yo volunteer 60% of my year's income tax that goes to armaments... Maybe the line should have been drawn when the bow and arrow were invented, maybe the gun, the cannon, maybe. Because now it is all wrong, all impractical, and all stupid. So all I can do is draw my own line now. I am no longer supporting my portion of the arms race . . ."

"one day I told Ira that I did not want to remain an ignoramus forever and asked if he would consider tutoring me more formally. Ira claims that I suggested the next idea, and I think that he did, but the discussion evolved into a proposition that we form a school called the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence."

"There was a great deal of profound joy in my life, but there was practically no fun. I didn't know much about having fun. I felt too guilty, as though I wasn't supposed to start having fun until everyone in the world was fed and clothed."

"I quit reading what the papers said about me because either they portrayed me as more self-sacrificing than I was, or they didn't like me and said, in a variety of ways, that I was a fake."

"Al Capp, creator of the "L'il Abner" comic strip, launched the most imaginative of the negative attacks, introducing a character into his strip called Joanie Phoanie...I asked for a retraction but did not get one."

"I learned to love the Japanese bow, and I use it to this day in concert to thank people for having come to hear me."

"Although I later fell in love with France, and now consider it my second home, the first country to win my young heart and seduce me with its language and beauty and fashion and flowers and intellect and men was Italy."

""Never close the door, you may need this person someday," is one of her favorite expressions. In 1983, at Newsweek's fiftieth anniversary celebration, I was seated across from Mary McCarthy at the head table. The big feature of the evening was a videotaped speech by Henry Kissinger. When he appeared on the big screen I stuffed my stockinged feet into their high heels and left the table, and stood in the lobby until it was finished. My moderation and diplomacy end where Henry's nose begins."

"I am thinking that Ronald Reagan is the same age as my father. They have some things in common. They are both young in spirit, buoyant, well-preserved, and optimistic. Beyond that, I can find only outstanding differences. The President is either ignorant of, or unconcerned by the ills of the world about which my father and I have been speaking. He is particularly immune to any part America may have in engendering these ills, as he dislikes the inconvenience of thinking beyond his own definitions of good-guys/bad-guys, and also doesn't like to be depressed. His pleasant, bumbling demeanor is preferable to the murderous efficiency of Kissinger and Kirkpatrick, but on the other hand, he is involved in the same dark and bloody deeds, all done under the same vast, all-encompassing and convenient banner of anticommunism. He feels that God is on his side, and that he really can do no wrong. What piques me is how this man and his followers can write off someone like my father. Because of my father's protestations about the raping of the Amazon forests, the pollution of our rivers, the misuse and depletion of natural energy, and the poisoning our children's air, people like my father are explained away with the flick of a wrist as a doomsayer, a depressive, a pessimistic liberal."

"there really is no normal, and the things that I do change: study Aikido, take photos, take a dance course, get back cooking, illustrate a songbook, take on a human rights project-write a book. But there are some friends who have remained constant"

"All of us alive are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival? (p. 322)"

"Women’s liberation was not on our radar, although I do remember noting to myself that women were basically running the office of the Boston draft resistance group behind the scenes. I was deeply involved because I had a draft resister boyfriend. That’s how most of us were involved (“Girls say yes to boys who say no,” as Joan Baez said"

"Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Joan Baez. She was the queen of folk music then and now. She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts, where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice. People would say, "What are you doing with that ragtag scrubby little waif?" And she'd tell everybody in no uncertain terms, "Now you better be quiet and listen to the songs." We even played a few of them together. Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. Love. And she's a free, independent spirit. Nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn't want to do it. I learned a lot of things from her. A woman with devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back."

"She was something else, almost too much to take. Her voice was like that of a siren from off some Greek island. Just the sound of it could put you into a spell. She was an enchantress. You'd have to get yourself strapped to the mast like Odysseus and plug up your ears so you wouldn't hear her. She'd make you forget who you were."

"There was a new popular music of protest. Pete Seeger had been singing protest songs since the forties, but now he came into his own, his audiences much larger. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, singing not only protest songs, but songs reflecting the new abandon, the new culture, became popular idols..."

"The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers — a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so."

"Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black."

"The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'"

"Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony, the homeliest of the suffragettes, was one of the movement's best speakers. In her Brooklyn campaign, Mrs. Chisholm would reel off a long quotation from Miss Anthony ("The hour is come when the women will no longer be the passive recipients...") when she was bothered by male hecklers on street corners. "It always stopped them cold," she reports. (April 1969)"

"My grandmother had a fantastic influence in my life. She would always check homework, and she would, each night she would "Repeat it to me." And if I didn't stand up straight, she said, "Child"-this is the way she'd talk-"Child, you got to stand up straight, let the world see you coming." And I would have to stand up straight...And she would say, "And don't slur your words." She, oh, she was pushy. My grandmother-I would say that my granny had the greatest influence in my life."

"It's the same old priority that we have today...Housing. Employment. Health. The same priorities follow black people in these United States time after time after time...the same issues. It's strange that they don't change."

"Well, it's being done very subtly in many instances, but our country has definitely moved to the right, there's no question about it, and so you find a kind of what should I say? There's a cutback on the kind of funding that is so necessary to help lower-class and middle class people to at least gain some opportunities. So in some instances it's worse than it used to be."

"The income for domestics in this country. Domestic workers. Every year we had the increase in income domestic workers never, never fit into the scale of things."

"Who knows? It took a little black woman, Harriet Tubman, to lead three hundred of her people out of slavery; it required another little black woman, Rosa Parks, to say she was tired of going to the back of the bus for a seat, and this act of very real courage precipitated the Montgomery bus boycott, which was a turning point in the civil rights struggle. It may take another little black woman to bring us together' in these troubled times of war and worry."

"It was an amazing and apparently spontaneous transformation in the attitudes and behavior of youth; the generation of the 1950s had been so famous for its "apathy" that some college newspapers banned the overused word from their editorials. Now it was enlisting en masse in a high-minded and high-spirited campaign to integrate the society by living and fighting together, going to jail together, and sometimes (this must never be forgotten) dying together. But the civil rights movement did not achieve its lofty ideals. Hotels and buses were desegregated, but blacks perceived slowly that they were not much better off than before. What good is it to be allowed to sit in the front of the bus when you haven't got the fare? Inevitably, the movement fell apart along racial lines. The blacks began to see that they were still, subtly, being treated as inferiors by the white students. They were in the same position that Frederick Douglass found himself in a century earlier with the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The well-meaning Garrison was using Douglass as an "exhibition piece," Douglass perceived, and when the great black leader demanded a more important role in the abolition movement, Garrison said he thought that the most black people were able to do at the moment was to serve as exhibits of the fact that they could be taught to read, write and speak about their experiences as slaves. Douglass understood then that he was still in a master-slave relationship with the white man and resolved to break his intellectual chains as well as his physical ones. Young blacks in the 1960s played out the same story. Where they had been integrationist and nonviolent, they became separatist and militant. It was the era of Black Power. Discovering that they were not going to win any important gains by carrying picket signs and coaching people for literacy tests, they declared their independence from white society in every way. In diet, dress, religion, clothing and behavior, they set out to become black, black and beautiful, black and proud. This struck a deep chord in the soul of black Americans, whose great need is to believe in their worth and dignity, their selfhood, after generations of having been beaten, sold, murdered, exploited and demeaned. They have been told in the most direct, brutal ways that they are worthless, and there are deep psychic wounds in the minds of all black Americans. A few hard-won gains in status have not healed them, and healing them is the most important priority for blacks. Independence movements, from community-united black fronts to the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa-each has an essential role to play in the cure. Of course, one may criticize some of their tactics. I have, myself; but it should not be missed that the people who hate and fear the militant black movements the most, and who would mobilize all the resources of the law against them, do not come with clean hands; they are people who have profited through the years from black subjugation. Many of them have supported in the past, by inaction or action, a group that was far worse than the most militant black ones, the Ku Klux Klan."

"different women view different segments of the women's movement agenda as priority items."

"The movement has, for the most part, been led by educated white middle-class women. There is nothing unusual about this. Reform as movements are usually led by the better educated and better off. But, if the women's movement is to be successful you must recognize the broad variety of women there are and the depth and range of their interests and concerns. To black and Chicano women, picketing a restricted club or insisting on the title Ms are not burning issues. They are more concerned about bread-and-butter items such as the extension of minimum wage, welfare reform and day care. Further, they are not only women but women of color and thus are subject to additional and sometimes different pressures."

"I did this [ran for president as a Democrat instead of third party] because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and battle it out toe to toe on the same ground as male counterparts."

"for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to reexamine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as long as their potential supporters hold this view."

"Few, if any Americans, are free of the psychological wounds imposed by racism and antifeminism."

"The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles, and stereotypes."

"We must reject the thought of Saint Paul who said, “let the woman marry in silence.""

"Black people have freed themselves from the dead weight of the albatross of the Blackness that once hung around their neck. They have done it by picking it up in their arms and holding them out with pride for all the world to see. They have done it by embracing it. Women must come to realize that the superficial symbolisms that surround us are negative only when we ourselves perceive and accept them as negative. We must begin to replace the old negative thoughts about our femininity with positive thoughts and positive actions that affirm them more and more. What we must also remember, is that we’ll be breaking with tradition. And so when you break with tradition, you have to prepare yourselves educationally, economically, and psychologically in order that you’ll be able to accept and bear with the sanctions that society will immediately impose upon us."

"I’m a politician. I detest the word because of the connotation that cling like slime to it. But for want of a better term, I must use it. I have been in politics for twenty years and in that time, I’ve learned a few things about the role of women in politics. The major thing that I have learned is that women are the backbone of America’s political organizations: they are the letter writers, the envelope stuffers, they are the speech writers and the largest numbers of potential voters. Yet, they are but rarely the standard bearers or elected officials."

"when I first announced that I was running for Congress, both male and females advised me, as they had when I ran for the New York State Assembly, go back to teaching, a woman’s vocation, and leave the politics to men."

"The question which now faces us is: will women dare in numbers sufficient to have an effect on their own attitude towards themselves and thus change the basic attitudes of males and the general society? Women will have to brave the social sanctions in great numbers in order to free themselves from the sexual, psychological, and emotional stereotyping that plagues us. It is not feminine egoism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine, it is simply a plain fact, the softness warmth and gentleness that are often used to stereotype us are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the general values of the whole of mankind are put more and more out of kilter. And the strength that marked Christ, Ghandi, and King was a strength born not out of violence but of gentleness, understanding, and gentle human compassion. We must move outside the walls of our stereotypes but, we must retain the values on which they were built."

"Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Sojourner Truth were not evolutionaries, they were revolutionaries, just as many of the young women in today’s society and more and more women must join their rank."

"Frantz Fanon pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks, that the anti-Semitic was eventually the anti-negro. I want to say that eventually both are antifeminist and even further, I want to indicate that all discrimination is essentially the same thing – anti-humanism. That is my charge to those of you in the audience this morning, whether you are male or female."

"The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a "Trip to Peking" in regard to the basic problems facing us in the United States this year? He is willing to go halfway 'round the world--yet he doesn't have time to walk ten blocks from the White House in Washington and look at the lives people are living under Phase II."

"A sales tax is the enemy of the poor person. It is the enemy of the elderly couple who live on fixed income. And it is the enemy of the everyday American consumer, poor or not."

"I am completely opposed to increasing the debt ceiling without basic tax reform. What we need in this country today is leadership which has the courage to call for income tax reform to put the burden where it must be placed, on those who can afford to pay."

"I know a lot of Americans who would be glad to settle for better bus service from their home to their jobs, or from poor neighborhoods to areas of the city where jobs are to be found. Repeated studies of riots in urban ghettos show that lack of adequate transportation was a big factor in the discontent and bitterness which caused riot conditions to erupt, but President Nixon's answer is to build a space shuttle or an SST with precious public funds, to serve a tiny elite of the population or to stimulate the economy of a state or region by creating massive and useless technological publicworks projects."

"I was well on the way to forming my present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States; it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gelded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own: their votes. And who benefits the most? The lawyers."

"Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. Even when the problems it ignores build up to crises and erupt in strikes, riots, and demonstrations, it has not moved. Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission."

"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses."

"The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians."

"I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential."

"There was one all-black student group, the Harriet Tubman Society. Some upperclassmen had started it, about a year before I joined it in my sophomore year. There I first heard people other than my father talk about white oppression, black racial consciousness, and black pride. The black students kept to their own tables in the cafeteria. We talked. No one said "rap" then, but that's what we did. I had some things to contribute, more out of my reading than my experience. I knew about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and George W. Carver, and I had managed to find some books in the public library about our African heritage that few people then studied or talked about; I knew about the Ashanti kingdoms, for instance."

"Men always underestimate women. They underestimated me, and they underestimated the women like me. If they had thought about it, they would have realized that many of the homes in black neighborhoods are headed by women. They stay put, raise their families and register to vote in greater numbers. The women are always organizing for something, even if it is only a bridge club. They run the PTA, they are the backbone of the social groups and civic clubs, more than the men. So the organization was already there."

"Discrimination against women in politics is particularly unjust, because no political organization I have seen could function without women."

"Some other black political leaders scolded me. I told them that no one has a right to call himself a leader unless he dares to lead."

"One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine."

"One question bothers me a lot: Who's listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It's as if I'm facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say. It seems so clear to me what's wrong with the whole system. Why isn't it clear to most others? The majority of Americans do not want to hear the truth about how their country is ruled and for whom. They do not want to know why their children are rejecting them. They do not dare to have to rethink their whole lives. There is a vacuum of leadership, created partly by the bullets of deranged assassins. But whatever made it, all we see now is the same tired old men who keep trucking down front to give us the same old songs and dances."

"Youth is in the process of being classed with the dark-skinned minorities as the object of popular scorn and hatred. It is as if the United States has to have a "nigger," a target for its hidden frustrations and guilt. Without someone to blame, like the Communists abroad and the young and black at home, middle America would be forced to consider whether all the problems of our time were in any way its own fault. That is the one thing it could never stand to do. Hence, it finds scapegoats."

"What is the alternative? What can we offer these beautiful, angry, serious, and committed young people? How are we all to be saved? The alternative, of course, is reform-renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation. This is our only hope. If my story has any importance, apart from its curiosity value the fascination of being a "first" at anything is a durable one- it is, I hope, that I have persisted in seeking this path toward a better world. My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone. When I wrote my campaign slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought," it was an expression of what I believe I was and what I want to be-what I want all candidates for public office to be. We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence- who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation's ideals. Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans - black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor - who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short."

"The attitudes some members of Congress display toward the rest of humanity, including their constituents, sometimes irritates and sometimes dismays me. They act like aristocrats. It has been a long time since Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as President, then rode his horse back to a boardinghouse and sat down to dinner with the rest of the roomers. Now even the most junior member of the House is surrounded by a hush of deference when he moves around the Hill."

"I used to be a moderate. I spent twenty years going to all kinds of meetings, trying to find ways all of us, black and white, could work together. Thousands like me kept saying, "Let us in a little. Give us a piece of the pie." What happened? Watts, Newark, Hartford. And what was the reaction? We started to hear a new jargon about "the urban crisis" and "law and order" and "crime in the streets." Today I am a militant. Basically I agree with what many of the extremist groups are saying- except that their tactics are wrong and too often they have no program. But people had better start to understand that if this country's basic racism is not quickly and completely abolished- or at least controlled there will be real, full-scale revolution in the streets. I do not want to see that day come. But I think often of what Malcolm once said about freedom: "You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom. Then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it.""

"As a teacher, and as a woman. I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending nine billion dollars–and more, I am sure–on elaborate, unnecessary and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation's capital get nothing."

"Mr. Nixon had said things like this: "If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no long. er in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart." And he said, "When you cut expenditures for education, what you are doing is shortchanging the American future.” But frankly. I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do."

"Apparently launching those new [domestic social] programs can be delayed for a while, after all. It seems we have to get some missiles launched first."

"Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs"

"We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are always the good guys, everywhere-in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kemer Commission told white America what black America had always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintain them and profit by them, white America would not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies of poverty and racism in our own country and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed as hypocrites in the eyes of the world when we talk about making other people free."

"Very interesting woman, Shirley. Wants to be varied in her approaches. Likes to do the unexpected. She believes, as I do, in building the new coalition to change the Democratic Party, and if our hopes materialize we're going to have a lot of clout in 1972. What she's concerned about, as I am, is that we get a good candidate, not just an acceptable, tired old liberal"

"Rev. Jesse Jackson called her a "woman of great courage.""She was an activist, and she never stopped fighting,""She refused to accept the ordinary, and she had high expectations for herself and all people around her,""

"Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!"

"Whether you agree with her politics or not, she had a moral compass. Why I was attracted to her story was because in some ways she's an average American woman who evolved into a strong and courageous politician."

"The woman who knew how to fight on all sides, you could never surround Shirley with too many enemies...To understand Shirley, one has to understand that she’s not just the first this, that or the other, she was up against the whole world when she ran for Congress. She was up against the Brooklyn machine, probably the most formidable in the country at the time. She was up against men, because the whole notion of this woman getting this rare seat to come up in New York was unheard of. Who did she think she was?...she was up against history. We were only then beginning to get used to having a critical mass — that’s all they were — of African-American men in Congress. She, for example, was part of the group that formed the Black Caucus. Now, here comes a woman, when there aren’t even many men, and said, look, I want to join you guys. Nobody was ready for it, but the black women in Brooklyn, who I think are chiefly responsible for putting her over, and then everybody joined the crowd."

"Our Lady of Food Justice & SNAP, trailblazer extraordinaire...OG Queen of Brooklyn."

"I don’t bend, that I come from the Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm school of Democrats, and that is unbought and unbossed."

"She was our Moses that opened the Red Sea for us,""

"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter. These poems speak to philosophy; they reveal the corners where we organize what we know."

"And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea we are the ones we have been waiting for"

"I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive. I wanted to get well and what I wanted to do as soon as I was strong, actually, what I wanted to do was I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death. And I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don't see why it's a good thing when you give up, or when you cooperate with those who hate you or when you polish and iron and mend and endlessly mollify for the sake of the people who love the way that you kill yourself day by day silently. And I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became my mother, the life of that woman was taken; I say it was taken away."

"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."

"If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic."

"Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations."

"I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience."

"If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable."

"Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?"

"As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life."

"1. “The People” shall not be defined as a group excluding or derogating anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, class, or age. 2. “The People” shall consciously undertake to respect and to encourage each other to feel safe enough to attempt the building of a community of trust in which all may try to be truthful and deeply serious in the messages they craft for the world to contemplate. 3. Poetry for the People rests upon a belief that the art of telling the truth is a necessary and a healthy way to create powerful, and positive, connections among people who, otherwise, remain (unknown and unaware) strangers. The goal is not to kill connections but, rather, to create and to deepen them among truly different men and women."

"Most of the women of the world-Black and First World and white who work because we must-most of the women of the world persist far from the heart of the usual Women's Studies syllabus. Similarly, the typical Black History course will slide by the majority experience it pretends to represent. For example, Mary McLeod Bethune will scarcely receive as much attention as Nat Turner, even though Black women who bravely and efficiently provided for the education of Black people hugely outnumber those few Black men who led successful or doomed rebellions against slavery. In fact, Mary McLeod Bethune may not receive even honorable mention because Black History too often apes those ridiculous white history courses which produce such dangerous gibberish as The Sheraton British Colonial "history" of the Bahamas. Both Black and white history courses exclude from their central consideration those people who neither killed nor conquered anyone as the means to new identity, those people who took care of every one of the people who wanted to become "a person," those people who still take care of the life at issue: the ones who wash and who feed and who teach and who diligently decorate straw hats and bags with all of their historically unrequired gentle love: the women."

"Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?"

"We, we know the individuality that isolates the man from other men, the either/or, the lonely-one that leads the flesh to clothing, jewelry, and land, the solitude of sight that separates the people from the people, flesh from flesh, that jams material between the spirit and the spirit. We have suffered witness to these pitiful, and murdering, masquerade extensions of the self.Instead, we choose a real, a living enlargement of our only life. We choose community."

"Efficiency, competence: Black students know the deadly, neutral definition of these words. There seldom has been a more efficient system for profiteering, through human debasement, than the plantations, of a while ago. Today, the whole world sits, as quietly scared as it can sit, afraid that, tomorrow, America may direct its efficiency and competence toward another forest for defoliation, or clean-cut laser-beam extermination."

"We are among those who have been violated into violence."

"In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal."

"Education has paralleled the life of prospering white America: it has been characterized by reverence for efficiency, cultivation of competence unattended by concern for aim, big white lies, and the mainly successful blackout of Black life."

"June Jordan, who has died aged 65, after suffering from breast cancer for several years, defied all pigeonholes. Poet, essayist, journalist, dramatist, academic, cultural and political activist — she was all these things, by turn and simultaneously, but above all, she was an inspirational teacher, through words and actions, and a supremely principled person. …Her life was about challenging oppression, and her characteristic talent was the ability to lay bare through her writing "the intimate face of universal struggle". … For Toni Morrison, the sum of June Jordan's career was: "Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art." All that aside, she was a joy to know."

"At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it."

"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc."

"I have realized that I was in danger of losing my relationship to black vernacular speech because I too rarely use it in the predominantly white settings that I am most often in, both professionally and socially. And so I have begun to work at integrating into a variety of settings the particular Southern black vernacular speech I grew up hearing and speaking. It has been hardest to integrate black vernacular in writing, particularly for academic journals. When I first began to incorporate black vernacular in critical essays, editors would send the work back to me in standard English. Using the vernacular means that translation into standard English may be needed if one wishes to reach a more inclusive audience. In the classroom setting. I encourage students to use their first language and translate it so they do not feel that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange them from that language and culture they know most intimately. Not surprisingly, when students in my Black Women Writers class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white students often complained. This seemed to be particularly the case with black vernacular. It was particularly disturbing to the white students because they could hear the words that were said but could not comprehend their meaning. Pedagogically, I encouraged them to think of the moment of not understanding what someone says as a space to learn. Such a space provides not only the opportunity to listen without "mastery," without owning or possessing speech through interpretation, but also the experience of hearing non-English words. These lessons seem particularly crucial in a multicultural society that remains white supremacist, that uses standard English as a weapon to silence and censor. June Jordan reminds us of this in On Call."

"June Jordan, who has been a touchstone of mine, really, since I first read her work in college, which was many, many years ago. So I really can't believe that I'm here today, and I'm really grateful to be here with all of you to celebrate her legacy and her life. June Jordan loved Black people, and so do I. She was an educator, and so am I. She was an activist; so am I. She was an internationalist, and so am I. She was a brilliant writer, and I am not-at all...She insisted that by organizing, we have the power to overcome oppression. I too believe this to be true."

"Aren't we blessed that June Jordan is one of the ancestors who we can call on and hear her voice to keep us centered in this current stormy weather? What can we hear from her in this moment? I think that love is a requirement of principled struggle, both self-love and love of others, that we must all do what we can, that it is better to do something rather than nothing, that we have to trust others as well as ourselves. I often repeat the adage that "hope is a discipline." We must practice it daily. June's work teaches us this truth."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?"

"As we move toward empowerment, we face the other inseparable question, what are we empowering ourselves for? In other words, how do we use this power we are reaching for? We can't separate those two. June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it, irresistible. That's what I want to do with all of my writing."

"We are hungry for heroes. To paraphrase June Jordan, we are the women whom we want to become."

"In this era of counter-revolution and its deadly effects, we can be discouraged into silence or reduced to caring only about our immediate, personal world. Or we can, as I heard poet June Jordan say at a conference in Arizona, fight back against "those pistol-packing gatekeepers of a house that never belonged to them in the first place." That sounds better! And let's remember: there would be no counter-attack today if we hadn't made some significant changes yesterday."

"In political journalism that cuts like razors, in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death’s mouth … she has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept. … I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art."

"A few years ago, there was the first collection ever published of political essays written by a Black woman-June Jordan. Think about that. It's amazing there are so few."

"In the words of June Jordan, “We always have choices. And capitulation is only one of them.”"

"June Jordan’s poetry embraces a half-century in which she dwelt as poet, intellectual, and activist: also as teacher, observer, and recorder. In a sense unusual among twentieth-century poets of the United States, she believed in and lived the urgency of the word — along with action — to resist abuses of power and violations of dignity in — and beyond — her country."

"She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality. She wrote from her experience in a woman's body and a dark skin, though never solely "as" or "for." Sharply critical of nationalism, separatism, chauvinism of all kinds as tendencies toward narrowness and isolation, she was too aware of democracy's failures to embrace false integrations. Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake's scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman's vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks's and Romare Bearden's portrayals of ordinary black people's lives; to James Baldwin's expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic...She knew many poetries, ancient and modern; her sonnets, for example, are both silken and surprising. But in her preface to the collection Passion, she matched herself consciously most incisive essays from the last two decades with the tradition of "New World poetry," non-European, deriving in North America from Whitman, and including "Pablo Neruda, Agostinho Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker and Edward Brathwaite.""

"I also want to read, and make, poems that remind me "why it must come," why what June Jordan calls the logic of "the infinite connectedness of human life" demands equality in community. This poetry is worth our most sacred and profane passion, because it embodies our desire, what we might create, in the difficult world around the poem."

"June's work opened new ways for me as a reader to think about nature poetry. In fact, as a longtime reader of her work, I had never thought of her as an environmental poet, perhaps because I had categorized her as a social justice poet and a black feminist writer, and in my mind, as a result of years of literary and cultural indoctrination, these identities were separate from what was most commonly defined as "nature poet." And yet, as I read her collected work again in search of nature poetry, I found it everywhere. June saw everything as connected, and she loved nature and spoke out on its behalf."

"June Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."

"Let us imagine the prospect-for the first time in the nation's history-of a population united for fundamental change. Would the elite turn as so often before, to its ultimate weapon-foreign intervention-to unite the people with the Establishment, in war? It tried to do that in 1991, with the war against Iraq. But, as June Jordan said, it was "a hit the same way that crack is, and it doesn't last long.""

"Probably the easiest thing would be to vasectimize males at the age of 13 after freezing some of their sperm. Then you could unfreeze it only after they have enough money to support a child up to the age of 18."

"Take assertiveness training, get paid what you're worth, join a consciousness raising group."

"The fact is that the choice between Socialism-from-Above and Socialism-from-Below is, for the intellectual, basically a moral choice, whereas for the working masses who have no social alternative it is a matter of necessity. The intellectual may have the option of "joining the Establishment" where the worker does not; the same option holds also for labor leaders, who, as they rise out of their class, likewise confront a choice that did not exist before. The pressure of conformity to the mores of the ruling class, the pressure for bourgeoisification, is stronger in proportion as personal and organizational ties with the ranks below become weak. It is not hard for an intellectual or bureaucratized official to convince himself that permeation of and adaptation to the existing power is the smart way to do it, when (as it happens) it also permits sharing in the perquisites of influence and affluence."

"Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves. Spiritually, gentrification is the removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity—the familiar interaction of different kinds of people creating ideas together. Urbanity is what makes cities great, because the daily affirmation that people from other experiences are real makes innovative solutions and experiments possible. In this way, cities historically have provided acceptance, opportunity, and a place to create ideas contributing to freedom. Gentrification in the seventies, eighties, and nineties replaced urbanity with suburban values, ... so that the suburban conditioning of racial and class stratification, homogeneity of consumption, mass-produced aesthetics, and familial privatization got resituated into big building, attached residences, and apartments. This undermines urbanity and recreates cities as centers of obedience instead of instigators of positive change."

"There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free."

"At the 2008 Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to books ignored by straight book awards) not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation's story?"

"Gentrification replaces most people's experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality. In this way gentrification is dependant on telling us that things are better than they are—and this is supposed to make us feel happy. It's a strange concept of happiness as something that requires the denial of many other people's experiences. For some of us, on the other hand, the pusuit of reality is essential to happiness. Even if the process gets us in trouble. It is very hard to get a glimpse of what is actually happening when one is constantly being lied to, and it is even harder to articulate what we realize is actually happening while intuiting that punishment awaits."

"Often a real conversation would illuminate nuances and correct misunderstandings. The real question is: Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? Why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict?"

"There is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable."

"Disaster originates in an initial overreaction to Conflict and then escalates to the level of gross Abuse. It is at the Conflict stage that the hideous future is still not inevitable and can be resolved. Once the cruelty and perhaps violence erupts, it is too late. Or at least requires a level of repair outside of the range of what many of us will do without encouragement and support. Conflict, after all, is rooted in difference and people are and always will be different. With the exception of those natural disasters that are not caused by human misdeed, most of the pain, destruction, waste, and neglect towards human life that we create on this planet and beyond, are consequences of our overreaction to difference. This is expressed through our resistance to facing and resolving problems, which is overwhelmingly a refusal to change how we see ourselves in order to be accountable. Therefore how we understand Conflict, how we respond to Conflict, and how we behave as bystanders in the face of other people’s Conflict determines whether or not we have collective justice and peace."

"The community holds the crucial responsibility to resist overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity. We have to help each other illuminate and counter the role of overstating harm instead of using it to justify cruelty. I suggest that we have a better chance at interrupting unnecessary pain if we articulate our shared responsibility in creating alternatives. Looking for methods of collective problem-solving make these destructive, tragic leaps more difficult to accomplish. People who are being punished for doing nothing, for having normative conflict, or for resisting unjustified situations, need the help of other people. While there are many excuses for not intervening in unjust punishment, that intervention is, nonetheless, essential. Without the intervention that most people are afraid to commit to, this escalation cannot be interrupted. In other words, because we won’t change our stories to integrate other people’s known reasons and illuminate their unknown ones, we cannot resolve Conflict in a way that is productive, equitable, and fair. This is why we (individuals, couples, cliques, families, communities, nations, peoples) often pretend, believe, or claim that Conflict is, instead, Abuse and therefore deserves punishment. That the mere fact of the other person’s difference is misrepresented as an assault that then justifies our cruelty and relinquishes our responsibility to change. Consequently, resistance to that false charge of Abuse is then positioned as further justification of even more cruelty masquerading as “punishment,” through the illogic at base of refusing accountability and repair."

"While perfection is never achievable, positive change is always possible. Resolution doesn’t mean that everyone is happy, but it does mean that perhaps fewer people are being blamed for pain they have not caused, or being cast as the receptacle of other people’s anxieties, so that fewer people are dehumanized by false accusation."

"Change requires awareness to propel a transformation of attitude. Once there is even a glimmer of awareness, it implies the ownership of an injustice, and a consequential responsibility for its solution, which must be expressed through behavior, not just feeling."

"Palestinians are, today, among the most victimized, scapegoated, and attacked people in the world. I watch as their suffering and mass murder is propagandized through pervasive dehumanized representations that falsely position them as “dangerous” when, in fact, they are the ones endangered and in desperate need of outside intervention."

"From the most potent potential for intimacy between strangers, to intimate domestic moments between lovers, to the claims of the state on its citizens, to the geopolitical phenomena of mass murder, we witness a continuum. Namely, false accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis. This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideologies should be actively challenged. Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms."

"It is not only the dominant who feel endangered when faced with normative conflict or when their own unjust actions are responded to with resistance. In fact these distorted reactions occur in both the powerful and the weak, the and the traumatized, in society and in intimacy. In arenas in which real abuse could conceivably take place, there are those who feel persecuted and threatened even though they are not in danger, and they often lack help from those around them to differentiate between the possible and the actual. Bullies often conceptualize themselves as being under attack when they are the ones originating the pain. Everywhere we look, there is confusion between Conflict and Abuse."

"If a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? If we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair."

"Confusing being mortal with being threatened can occur in any realm. The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means that we are alive. Mortality is the sign of life. In the most intimate and personal of arenas, many of us have loved and trusted someone who violated that trust. So when someone else comes along who intrigues us, whose interests we share, who we enjoy being with, with whom there could be some mutual enrichment and understanding, that does not mean that we are going to be violated again. And experiencing confusion, disagreement, frustration, and difference does not mean that we are being violated again. Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust."

"Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can’t know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept."

"Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange, childish act of destruction in which nothing can be won. Like all withholding, it comes from a state of rage, and states of rage are products of the past. As some say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” By refusing to talk without terms, a person is refusing to learn about themselves and thereby refusing to have a better life. It hurts everyone around them by dividing communities and inhibiting learning."

"People need interactive conversations, even short ones, in order to understand each other."

"Romance doesn’t always start off on the right foot, two people don’t always see the potential in one another at the same time, and thankfully, other people can change us with their hope, forgiveness, and optimism. We can make each other’s lives better, despite all our fears. Sometimes one of us knows that before the other."

"While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love."

"No answer is not an answer. It is unreasonable to expect other people to interpret our silences."

"It is a sign of maturity and decency to acknowledge that often all parties participate in making mistakes that can produce discord. In our time, recognizing this fact is part of being an honest person of depth. It helps us understand that trouble between people gets transformed when everyone takes responsibility for their part. Negotiation is a process, first of acknowledgment, and then adjustment to the new information produced by that acknowledgment. Recognizing mutuality of cause is a principle that allows progressive change without . Scapegoating, after all, is often rooted in the false accusation that one person or group is unilaterally responsible for mistakes that are actually contributed to by multiple parties."

"People may feel angry, frustrated, upset. But this does not mean they are being abused. They could, instead, be in Conflict. Instead of identifying as a victim, they might be, as Matt Brim suggested, Conflicted. Therefore the fact that one person is suffering does not inherently mean that the other party is to blame. The expectation that we will never feel badly or anxious or confused is an unreasonable expectation and doesn’t automatically mean that someone else is abusing us. These emotions are part of the human experience."

"People may not know how to make things better, how to look at their own participation, how to deal with feeling badly about themselves. They may not know how to understand their own actions, and are afraid of the implications of their actions on the meaning of their lives. And this may be devastating, tormenting, and painful. But this is not being Abused. It doesn’t get resolved by organizing punishment of another person. And someone who feels conflicted in this way does not have the right to take punitive actions against another person because they feel bad."

"People may be part of negative friendships, families, or communities who attack outsiders instead of being self-critical. They may be receiving encouragement to blame and scapegoat others. They may live within groups, relationships or families that do not tolerate the admission of mistakes, and that reinforce Supremacy ideologies about each other in order to maintain illusions of righteousness. This pressure, resulting in the action of collectively deflecting blame, does not mean that the person being blamed is abusive. In fact, it says nothing at all about that person, except that they are in turn being caused great pain for no reason. And in my mind, they have the right to resist that unilateral blame. In this way, group bullying is multiplicative of injustice, even though it is done in the name of nation, family, friendship, or distorted renditions of “loyalty.”"

"Being in a negative moment with another person can be destabilizing, hurtful, and stressful, especially if a person’s self-concept requires them to think of themselves as perfect. But it is not, by definition, Abuse. It could be Abuse, if one has power over another, but if not, it’s a Conflict. And being in a Conflict is a position that is filled with responsibility and opportunity."

"Lacking the support and encouragement to successfully negotiate does not mean that someone is being victimized. True, we have to recognize that the frustration of not knowing how to solve problems and only knowing how to escalate can feel like a response to an outside force, but it is, in fact, internal. Differentiating requires awareness, and we may be dependent on our surrounding communities, including social workers, to achieve this."

"People who describe themselves as “Abused” when they are actually in Conflict are not lying; they usually don’t know the difference. We’re not talking here about the tired false cliché of the vindictive woman who “cries rape” or diabolically constructs the other as an abuser while knowing full well that the charge is false. What we have instead is a devolved definition of personal responsibility, which constructs avoidance as a right regardless of the harm it does to others. This negative standard persuades some people to feel that being uncomfortable signals that they are being Abused, because they don’t have the option of describing themselves as Conflicted. So asking a distressed person if they are unsafe, or rather, uncomfortable, angry, or hurt provides them with an alternative idea that might fit better with their actual experience. It not only elicits helpful information, but encourages the individual to start to think about themselves in a more adult, complex, and responsible manner."

"Helping each other negotiate is the bedrock of a healthy and active community, clique, family, country. Instead of shunning, shutting down information and scapegoating from a place of non-responsibility, the Conflicted must express, focus, listen, and transform. It is my claim that in situations of Conflict, accusations that attribute sole responsibility to one party and then construct them as deserving of punishment or shunning are unjust."

"It is unethical to hurt someone because we have been told to do so. We are required by decency to ask both the complainant and the accused how they understand the situation. And this, I truly believe, requires an in-person discussion. Asking hard questions and creating an environment in which complexities can be faced is, after all, what a real friend does."

"Truths can be multiple and are revealed by the order of events. [...] Each moment is a consequence of the previous moment. So truths can be complex, and complexity is articulated by its details. Anyone who refuses to hear the details is making a deliberate decision not to understand."

"Resisting unjustified punishment is not Abuse. And people who are being asked to stand by and passively allow shunning to take place certainly should know exactly what the accuser is claiming and exactly what the shunned party is experiencing. Without that information, the decision to be a complicit bystander is an unjustified one. Simply wanting to exclude, silence, or dehumanize someone through forced absence is not an inherent right."

"The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world. US foreign policy is enforced by the military who are a global police, and domestic order is enforced by the federal, state, and city structures of policing. The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state."

"What was even more distracting and confusing was that the job of punishing the expressions of patriarchy, racism, and poverty was assigned to the police, who also cause violence. This responsibility, in some cases, produced additional acts of violence on the part of the government, like “,” and that committed violence in the name of claiming to fight violence. These laws also produced more access for the state into the homes and families of the poor, and more incarceration of Black and other poor men. Instead of empowering women and the poor, the fate of the traumatized was increasingly in the hands of the power of the police acting as a group to represent oppressive systems."

"We have learned over and over again, through the almost mechanistic co-optation of a wide range of radical movements and disenfranchised communities, that as long as the system of domination and power remains intact, winning “rights” or realignment in the hierarchy simply means that the most normative elements of any community gain access to the state apparatus. When this happens, the least powerful elements remain the objects of their force. New insiders will create new outsiders if the way we think about our society doesn’t change. Conflicting interpretations of the vocabulary of Abuse appeared to address a problem while simultaneously reinforcing the abusive status quo. Some people may get their problems addressed, but others will have their problems aggravated. In this way, the state and the interests it serves, Kim Emery points out, will have their authority both legitimated and instrumentally extended."

"The definition of “violence” has now expanded to include a new continuum of behaviors and feelings that are also generically used to ascribe a negative value to a person’s actions. The word “violence” has expanded far beyond the field of physical assault to also mean emotional abuse and, unfortunately, emotional conflict where there is no abuse. In recent years, we see “violence” and “abuse” being ascribed to , efforts to understand phenomena, and social and psychological analysis. “Abuse” is also regularly used to describe disagreement and misunderstanding. Accusations of “policing,” “shaming,” and other expressions of “call-out culture” demanding “safety” from uncomfortable ideas represent people and actions as laden with blame, refusing interactivity around the content of ideas and perceptions. This is in line with the similar practice of calling racial analysis “playing the race card.” Trying to understand and explain structures of pathology is repressed by accusations of wrong-doing. Thinking is wrong. Saying is wrong. Not only are revelations unwanted, they get mischaracterized as harm."

"The word “violence” should be used to describe physical violence. Emotional cruelty, shunning, group bullying—these things can be worse than some violence, but they are not the same. If this wide range of precise experiences is all collapsed into the generic word “violence,” then nothing has any differentiation, therefore all the variations lose meaning. And as I have been arguing, rhetorical devices that hide details keep truth from being known and faced. Using the word “violence” without metaphor will help with the current discourse of overreaction and help us discern, with more awareness, the differences between Abuse and Conflict."

"In a healthy educational forum, students engage materials regardless of agreement or comfort level and then analyze, debate, critique, and learn from them, addressing the discomfort as well as the text."

"The problem with shunning is that it keeps information that can be productive out of the realm of consideration. Healthy discourse means dealing with what exists and coming into some kind of relationship of understanding with reality. Defended discourse forbids or shuns certain perspectives or contexts to information. The focus of these trigger warnings was usually on sexual violence, but the constraints, by implication, could lead to students being exempted from materials describing colonialism, racial Supremacy, Occupation, or anything that they might find upsetting, even from a Supremacy position."

"My view, in sum, was that while sexual and physical abuse does occur on campuses, and prejudice and discrimination may be rampant in class, actual sexual and physical abuse do not usually take place in a classroom. So intellectual, educational settings are among the few places in life where these things can be analyzed and engaged with depth without threat of actual physical danger. Being reminded that one was once in danger has to be differentiated from whether or not one is currently in danger. Confusing the two is a situation that quickly becomes destructive. Being conscious about one’s own traumatized past experiences, and how they manifest into current traumatized behavior, can be a force for awareness of one’s own reactions, not a means of justifying the repression of information. Additionally, as a teacher, I opposed all restraints from administrations on classrooms."

"Processed awareness of one’s own experience of oppression and violation are crucial expressions that must be heard, and are essential contributions to public understanding. And expression of terrible experiences starts out unprocessed and raw. And pain must be heard. At the same time, unprocessed violation and pain cannot be at the helm of control of what information is allowed to be expressed by others, including teachers, and required to be engaged in a classroom."

"Time and time again, Americans are reminded of the fact that the people who become police officers in the United States are often absolutely incapable of problem solving. There are famous examples of parents calling the police to “scare” their children, and the children ending up being murdered by the police. In cases of Conflict, calling the police is the last thing any of us should be doing unless our only objective is to cause more pain."

"Physical violence has many varied manifestations, and non-defensive violence is never justified or desirable, nor does it solve problems. The most common scenario is the regularly violent spouse who initiates violence as a control mechanism, where it is used to enforce behaviors in the victim. Then there is the couple who both lack problem-solving skills and resort to violence irregularly, or in a single incident, in ways that are equally undesirable but don’t result in one person’s domination. They do not endanger each other physically, although there are clearly signs of problems that need to be faced and dealt with. These are obviously different phenomena. And I think they should be treated differently even though they both involve physical violence. Once we stop being determined to produce a victim and are instead focused on learning the truth of what actually happened, we become willing to accept the discomfort of recognizing two people as being Conflicted and embrace a more humane and acknowledging vision of social relationships. This is essential if we want peace."

"People do things for reasons, even if they don’t know what those reasons are."

"Anxiety is best addressed by support and love in trying to understand those reasons, not the false “loyalty” of aggression to escalate unjust actions. When we are in community with people who are escalating, we have to ask the right questions in order to understand what past experiences the instigator is responding to in the present. That is the responsibility of real friendship, the true definition of love."

"The police are often the least likely people to be able to solve problems, to think in nuanced ways about emotional pain and its projections, and as a result are not the people we need help from if we are interested in creating peace."

"We should not isolate, denounce, and punish people for being human."

"Once people are given the right to punish or to threaten punishment by the state, they are no longer required to interrogate themselves and can fall back on convenient dehumanized views of the people they want to hurt. This is what Supremacy Ideology does: it provides the empowered with delusions of superiority, as the ideology itself masquerades as reality. This is why some people feel righteous in calling the police instead of facing their own anxieties, and why others reinforce them in this terrible decision, or even worse: they stand by and do nothing."

"Never, ever decide that you know who someone is, what they did, their objective, context or goal, how they feel or what they know, until you ask them. And not asking means a direct investment in not understanding the truth."

"The privileged are often good at articulating injury but not always able to identify if they are actually experiencing it. There is a difference in being able to recognize the conditions under which injury has or is happening, and actually living, or having lived through it."

"Privilege has always been a dulling factor in one’s comprehension of human difference."

"Just as a group of bad friends reinforces unilateral supremacist thinking by encouraging group punishment and shunning of the conflicted other, good friends insist that people think twice, to look to their own participation in conflict instead of calling the police. Good groups help their family, friends, and community members recognize and dissipate anxiety rather than joining them in acting out cruelly against others."

"Once people are given the right of dominance, that is the right to punish or to threaten punishment by the state, they are no longer required to examine themselves. It has never been shown that punishment works. Punishment, denouncing, excluding, threatening, and shunning often create a worse society. It divides people, causes great pain, compromises individual integrity, and obscures truths in the name of falsely shoring up group reputation. Similarly, there is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable. So creating new classes of people who can threaten someone with the state, or who can call the police, does not produce more justice, and is more likely to produce more injustice."

"HIV criminalization assumes that society itself is negative, and that the threat to society is positive. HIV criminalization is making it easier for the negative person to avoid communication and instead call on the state to punish the positive person. It encourages the HIV negative person to see themselves as victimized instead of as an equally conflicted party in a human relationship, with mutual responsibilities, feelings, and accountability. It is a governmental privileging of anxiety and punishment over communication, thereby dividing people between those who claim to be good and clean and normal and therefore deserving of state protection, and those whom the first group wish to separate from and hurt whether it is justified or not; whether it makes things better or not."

"It is our moral obligation as human beings who share this time and this place to not punish, but rather to remain calm, to open up communication, and to place our hands gently on each other’s shoulders and say, “Think twice.”"

"The force that takes Conflict and misrepresents it as Abuse is called Escalation. Escalation is a kind of smokescreen to cover up the agent’s own influence on events, their own contributions to the Conflict. By escalating in the face of nothing, normative conflict, or resistance and acting as if it is Abuse, we avoid having to confront ourselves, or our family, our clique, our HIV status, our country, our own individual and group shortcomings, our anxieties from an unresolved past. Instead, we use accusation to create an artificial furor to override or distract from our own responsibility."

"Escalating Conflict to the status of Abuse obscures our desires, our own contributions to problems in relationships, our own anxieties about sex, love, and HIV, our own projections from our pasts onto the non-deserving present, and it disavows our agency in a manner that enhances the power of the state. Escalation under these circumstances is a resistance to self-knowledge."

"Certainly I am not a practitioner of doing nothing. There is little more destructive than the passive bystander allowing cruelty to be freely imposed. I’m the opposite of a Buddhist, as I believe in action. But there are all kinds of actions: some are designed to acknowledge and reveal the sources of conflict and pain in order to resolve them, and some are designed to obscure those sources so that resolution/change can never occur. Which one we choose, of course, is related to how we see ourselves and others, and what we don’t see about ourselves and others. There is no evidence that time heals all wounds, or even most wounds; instead, it freezes unnecessary enmity and makes it harder to overcome. Time allows perpetrators to forget the pain they have imposed."

"We all have an ideal imagined self and a real self, and there is always a gap between the two. I’ve never met a person who was exempt from this. The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, that gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change. But it never goes away. When we can’t move forward and the gap widens, many of us become paralyzed. The breach between the real self and the imagined self is unbearable, and the reality of our lives becomes unacceptable, undoable, and we become stuck: we can’t move out of our parents’ house, we can’t take a job that compromises our entitlement, we can’t actually fulfill our dreams and, finally, we can’t adjust those dreams."

"Obviously I am not a clinician, but I have lived, loved, listened, felt, expressed, and observed. I have looked within and without. So without authority beyond my own experiences and how I understand them, I have observed that people living in unrecovered trauma often behave in very similar ways to the people who traumatized them. Over and over I have seen traumatized people refuse to hear or engage information that would alter their self-concepts, even in ways that could bring them more happiness and integrity. For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent “right” not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation; that whatever is keeping them together is not flexible. Perhaps because Supremacy in some produces Trauma in others, they can become mirror images. And of course, many perpetrators were/are victims themselves."

"We know that usually a traumatized person has been profoundly violated by someone else’s cruelty, overreaction, and/or lack of accountability. The experience could be incident-based (rape by a stranger or being hit by a drunken driver), or it could be ongoing over a long period of time (being constantly demeaned and beaten by a stepfather, paternal sexual invasion, alcoholic or mentally ill parents), or systematic (intense and constant experiences of prejudice, denial of one’s humanity, deprivation, violence, occupation, genocide). The traumatized person’s sense of their ability to protect themselves has been damaged or destroyed. They feel endangered, even if there is no actual danger in the present, because in the past they have experienced profoundly invasive cruelty and they know it is possible. Or in the case of ongoing systemic oppression, they receive cruelty from one place, and project it onto another."

"There is a strong element of shame in Trauma that makes thinking and behavior so inflexible. The person cannot accept adjustment, an altering of their self-concept; they won’t bear it and they won’t live with it. And if their group, clique, family, community, religion, or country also doesn’t support self-criticism, they ultimately can’t live with it."

"In my own life, I have found that the most dangerous response to shame is recognition. Those of us who have lived lives of shared public space like a city, or who study history, know that people suffer. We know that people’s lives are complex, filled with contradiction and obstacles. So when someone tells us that their mother allowed their stepfather to beat them, or their son cannot take care of himself, or their father was sexually invasive, or their parents are alcoholics, or they were projected onto by a trusted lover so that they no longer allow themselves relationships, or that they themselves suffer from anxiety and mental illness, it can play out in different ways. The offering of honest information can be a test to see what it is like to tell the truth, to see if real experience will be met with rejection. But I find that if the information is received with consequential recognition, i.e., “Now that we know this, our relationship is elevated,” there is a possibility of a backlash, because that means the experience is real; the awful thing is no longer a repressed secret but a recognized reality. And this can provoke an explosion of regression. The recognition itself is now called a harm. The pain of the original violation is projected onto the person who knows about it. “What you are doing to me is worse than anything my father ever did to me,” becomes the accusation. Because, unlike the father, we are not pretending it away."

"Often the words “privacy” or “boundaries” are used to deflect recognitions of Shame. Privacy, or rather invasion of, is when the government collects data on you without your consent. Shame, to me, is hiding information that reveals common human experiences, contradictions, and mistakes. Sometimes this is imposed from the outside through stigma. For example, being HIV positive is a common human experience, but some people hide it because they fear unjustified cruelties imposed by others. But for many, shame-based hiding is often imposed from within. They want to conceal their experience because they don’t understand that it is widely shared. There is a narcissism in trauma-based shame: a belief that one is special and different and that others can’t possibly feel the same way, understand, or need understanding."

"The business of psychological studies is a messy one. There are so many and they contradict each other, but like poetry, they can stimulate thought."

"Human life, being mortal, is inherently filled with risk, and one of the greatest dangers is other people’s escalation. It can hasten the inevitable end before we’ve had a chance to really begin. It can be a terrible waste of life and potential. Being the object of overreaction means being treated in a way that one does not deserve, which is the centerpiece of injustice. Yet, protesting that overreaction is often the excuse for even more injustice. There is a continuum of pathology in blame, cold-shouldering, shunning, scapegoating, group bullying, incarcerating, occupying, assaulting, and killing. These actions are substitutions for our better selves, and avoid the work of self-acknowledgment required for resolution and positive change. Refusing to resolve conflict is a negative action, yet many families, cliques, communities, religions, governments, and nations choose this option all the time."

"Feeling “safe” of course is already a problematic endeavor since there is little guarantee of safety in our world, and the promise of it is a false one, as the effort to enforce this is often at the expense of other people. Both Supremacists and the Traumatized may conceptualize themselves as “weak” or “endangered” unless others around them are controlled, repressed, punished, or destroyed. The concept of “” can also be a projection in the present based on dangers that occurred in the past. It may have once been used for those living in illegality, like gay people, Jews, immigrants, or adults who now have agency but were oppressed as children. But now those of us who have become dominant continue to use this trope to repress otherness. It is used by the dominant to defend against the discomfort of hearing other people’s realities, to repress nuance, ignore multiple experiences, and reject the inherent human right to be heard. Instead, it may even be considered victimizing by the supremacist/traumatized person to not simply follow their orders when they “feel” or say that they “feel” endangered, even if that feeling is retrospective."

"Safety is an acquisition of power, often dependent on unjust structures of subjugation to satisfy the threatened person or group’s need for control. Normativity itself is dependent on the diminishment of others. We know now that determining punishment by the feelings of one party is the essence of injustice."

"My conclusion from this experience of noticing the similarity of behavior between the projecting traumatized person and the entitled self-aggrandized supremacist person is that both need and want dominance in order to feel comfortable. And yet the sources of this need are so different. Underlying all of this is the fact that traumatized behavior is most often caused by Supremacy. [...] These two entirely different entities, Trauma and Supremacy, operate with resonance and similarity under the same system. And, of course, these two impulses can co-exist in the one body."

"At the base of the demand to refuse information/knowledge/communication in order to maintain rigid control is the belief in one’s self as human, and of the other as not-human: a specter or monster. Inherent in the insistence on a refusing party’s righteousness and the other’s blame is the illusion that the control is value-free, neutral, natural, and simply the way things are. But we are all, in fact, human. Because Trauma and Supremacy are ideological but also emotional and perhaps biological, they are compounded obstacles to peace. They are systems. These systems live within, and are expressed without. These are inabilities, limitations from the soul, and expressed through the active body; therefore they represent, as Mary Daly might say, “dis-ease.” The dehumanization involved in overstatement of harm as a justification of cruelty is a form of illness, a systemic malfunction that is produced by our humanity, mortality, and literal vulnerability compounded with levels of protection, societal placement, and reward. Unfortunately social convention that either denies the existence of mental illness in one’s own ranks or uses it as an excuse for shunning others, makes it difficult to call the Supremacy/Trauma mirror what it is: delusional, i.e., rooted in untruth. And if you can’t name something honestly, it cannot be acknowledged, addressed, and healed."

"We are suffering, and if we could all acknowledge that suffering has content, we could all understand, as a community, somewhat better how to help each other."

"As Will Burton says, “pain has a story, a narrative,” and knowing it reveals human complexity which is an invitation to decency. When we try to understand, we discover causes, origins, and consequences about each other and our selves."

"Unfortunately, groups that rely on perfection, the good/evil dichotomy, and are motivated by a paralyzing fear of ever being wrong, often deny that mental illness/distorted thinking is in play. Bad families, bad friends, negative communities, and supremacist identities hide and deny contradictions, and rely on the projection of blame onto others to maintain their cohesion as perfect. Pervasive depression gets called sadness. Anxiety that is so severe as to control one’s life gets called upset or difficult or sensitive. And no one is allowed to talk about why any of it is happening."

"Suicide is often a failure of community, and claiming it as inevitable is a defense against that failure."

"To understand, compassionately, that someone is suffering from distorted thinking to the extent that they are hurting themselves and/or others is not an attack. It is the honest, loving truth. Yet in false loyalty systems, saying that someone is suffering is considered worse than the suffering itself, which everyone pretends isn’t occurring. Ironically, bullying, shunning, scapegoating, threatening, violence, occupation, racism, and other forms of cruelty are not only created by instability, they produce instability. When they overreact, both the supremacist and the traumatized person insist that others not resist or object to their orders. They expect complete control, but in reality they produce instability in others in the form of unnecessary pain."

"Shunning by family, cliques, or governments is an active form of harassment, and is consistently detrimental to all parties, even as it becomes normalized and status quo. Our friend, family member, co-worker, fellow HIV-negative, fellow citizen, or co-religionist may suffer from mental illness manifesting as Supremacy or Trauma. Consequently, they may be calling Abuse as an apparatus to absolve themselves of responsibility that they do not have the support to face. Our complicity with ignoring their suffering and our complicity with falsely placing the blame on the other party is not only not loyalty, it hurts them. It makes them worse. This is the opposite of friendship. The denial is dishonest and it prolongs the torture. It sucks. And it’s shallow, and desperately needs to be dismantled."

"A “trigger” is a form of overreaction crucial to the conflation of Conflict with Abuse. We react constantly through life. Breathing, noticing, thinking, swallowing, feeling, and moving are all reactions. Most reactions are not really observed because they are commensurate with their stimuli, but a triggered reaction stands out because it is out of sync with what is actually taking place. When we are triggered, we have unresolved pain from the past that is expressed in the present. The present is not seen on its own terms. The real experience of the present is denied. Although reacting to the past in the present may make sense within the triggered person’s logic system, it can have detrimental effects on those around them who are not the source of the pain being expressed, but are being punished nonetheless. They are acting in the present, but are being made accountable for past events they did not cause and cannot heal. The one being falsely blamed is also a person, and this burden may hurt their life. The person being triggered is suffering, but they often make other people suffer as well. There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, both parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this."

"Shunning, an active form of harassment, is never useful in resolving problems; in most cases it is petty and primarily a way to avoid an adjustment of the self that is required for accountability. If it has no terms for resolution, it is simply a form of asserting supremacy and imposing punishment, and punishment, as we know, rarely does anything but produce more pain."

"Shunning as an end-point to normative conflict is the definition of absurdity. Shunning is not only a punitive silencing, but it is a removal from humanity, and therefore reliant on the Making of Monsters. After all, no one owns humanity and humans cannot be removed from themselves. It’s a delusion."

"When anxiety is at the wheel, we tragically project, blame, and then separate. We flee reality, which is the fact of conflict as part of life, rather than confront difference and expand our understanding of ourselves."

"There are options, and even though anxiety may make the reality of choices elusive, they still exist. Recognize the existence of the anxiety, then strive to overcome it in order to perceive other options."

"In the embodiment of the good group, through the therapist, a person can be helped to understand their own motivations, reactions, and choices, to achieve an ongoing desire for awareness."

"“Overindulgence” is a deprivation of constructive attention, a refusal to teach social/life skills, a refusal to teach self-regulation in social situations, a refusal to teach how to distinguish between wants and needs. Desires are indulged at the place where needs are starved. This is the abandonment of the child, and the responsibility to parent, disguised."

"Lack of empathy, of course, is central to conflating Conflict and Abuse. Inherent in the sequence is an absence of thought as to the consequences of the false accusations on others. This is followed by feelings of shock and rage when others resist their unjust treatment. All this, of course, is rooted in a childish but pervasive expectation that their orders will be followed. And if that obedience is not in place, huge feelings emerge of being threatened by the others who express disagreement."

"Blame is when the reasons behind conflict, the order of events, are not allowed to be addressed, where the understanding that could reveal how both parties contribute is blatantly denied. For me, it is not the understanding itself that is the blame; it’s what fills the void left by refusal to understand."

"Growing up with chaos can make it harder to know how to create order as an adult."

"I believe that a truly “good” family is one that is deeply and in fact primarily concerned with the behavior of its members towards other people. That instead of reinforcing indifference, exploitative behavior, arrogance about class, race or gender, blind allegiance to the state, and cruelty towards sexual partners, they systematize methods of accountability. In this way, each family member would grow up with a loving practice of opposition, with the commitment to psychological insight, individuation, and a means of discussion that emphasizes context, objective, and the order of events. Blind adherence would be the definition of “disloyalty,” as it is detrimental to peace and justice. Our model for relationships within groups can be transformed from obedience to biology, biological assumption, or simulacra of biology, emphasizing instead the ethics of each individual’s actions, cumulative consequence, and the necessity of self-criticism. In other words: accountability."

"All human beings, by virtue of being born, deserve care, recognition, protection, fairness, and opportunity."

"All human beings deserve to be heard and considered."

"If we are really feminists then we know that the mother is also a person. She has a body, she has a sexuality, she has dreams for her own life. She has things she wants and needs. Up until a certain point, these desires cannot be priorities over protecting and developing her children. But this information has to be integrated into the children’s world views so that they don’t grow up to become adults, especially adult men, who expect and believe that women are in the world to serve them for the remainder of those women’s lives."

"Despite how enriching it may be for a child to learn from their parents, school should be starting them on the journey of learning how to individuate, how to develop their own world, their own habits, responsibilities, and relationships; how to live on their own, support themselves, and help others. They need to have their own secrets, dreams, private experiences, and independence."

"One of the fallacies in a queer context is the assumption that queer mothers are somehow inherently feminist because they managed to separate themselves from heterosexuality. Being attracted to or even loving a woman has no relationship to treating her, and by extension one’s self, as a person who matters. On one hand, lesbians give each other meaning in private, and yet this requires a transcendence of lifelong messages about women’s lack of worth. Treating another women with decency, care, forgiveness, and flexibility is certainly not an automatic impulse."

"Feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it."

"Politics is a consequence of how a person understands their experience."

"Every person needs to be parented. By this I mean that every person needs to be helped, encouraged, and supported in becoming accountable to themselves and others. To not be threatened by taking other people into account. To not be frightened of difference."

"A true friend can be a blood or legal relation. They can be in the same clique or neighborhood or workplace. They can belong to the same racial, cultural, religious, or national group. But a true “friend” asks the right questions about category itself, and thereby transcends it. A true friend has the conversation."

"Looking back, I can now see that Hood is part of a small but interesting body of lesbian novels of loss and bereavement (by people like Sarah Schulman, Marion Douglas, Sarah Von Arsdale, Carol Anshaw) written in the 1990s. We were catching up with the boys, perhaps; gay men really took the lead in writing honest and beautiful books about mourning."

"People are a bit blind. They don’t see life. Being a photographer I see life, every inch of it. I’m obsessed with nature and animals and the earth; I find concrete things that distract me. Most people are the opposite… they find life boring, squirrels or sparrows boring, whereas I find them fascinating. It has to do with the way we live. It probably started with religion which leads some people astray. To fight over whose god is better has nothing to do with love or spirituality. Perhaps it’s guilt. We are suppressed and spend our time trying to figure out who we are. The most shocking thing I’ve learned concerns abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, abuse to every living creature. There is a world of little Hitlers out there. Slaughterhouses, vivisection and experimenting on animals for no reason is sick. Luckily younger people are becoming more aware."

"I'm trying to reproduce healthily in a vegetarian way every kind of flesh there is — bacon, smoked salmon, roast meat. We're working on it. A lot of vegetarians complain that my book [Linda McCartney's Home Cooking] is meat-oriented and some of the products look like meat. For me, though, it's a matter of not just preaching — I hate to do it and it doesn't work — but helping to make the alternatives more attractive to more people. Change the eating habits and maybe you change the thinking habits. … I'm convinced that part of the reason the world is so sick is that so many people eat flesh. What are you doing but eating a slab of fear? … Look how long it took to abolish slavery. There was a time when much of the "civilized" world thought it was acceptable. And then they saw that it was wrong. I think the same thing will happen with eating animals. I have faith that the day will come when the world looks back and says, "How could we have done that?""

"At 13, I decided to give up all meat and fish. My parents were even more surprised and cautiously supportive – provided I learned how to get enough protein. The first vegetarian cookbook I ever bought to learn more about how to be a healthy vegetarian was "Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking." In a very pragmatic way, Linda McCartney helped me meet my mother’s conditions for being a vegetarian, to get enough protein and eat a well-balanced diet and, in the process, helped both my mom and me feel good about the choice I had made."

"In early 1981 one of the most important moments in my life occurred. I entered a vivisection lab … In one of the cages, I saw a young Alaskan malamute … The dog tried to lick my face through the bars. Maybe he thought I had come to save him. I saw the infected stitches in the belly, oozing pus and blood. I saw the filthy, encrusted tube that was draining fluid out of his stomach. And as I held him, I saw the rotted stitches start to come apart and his guts start to spill out. As gently as I could, I let him down onto the floor of the cage and placed my hand on him, trying to comfort him in those last few moments of his life. I was still holding him when at last he took his final struggling breaths and died. It seemed to take a lifetime. I was close to tears as I looked at the body, and I thought, this isn’t science — this is madness. Standing there, looking at that gentle animal lying dead in a bloody cage, I made a promise to him and to myself, that I would never forget him, that I would keep on fighting vivisection until it was ended."

"I decided to become Vegan simply because if you care about animals and people, there is no other choice but to be vegan. It’s a very simple equation — meat and dairy = animal and human suffering. … When you know the truth about meat and dairy the hard thing would be to continue to eat them."

"Right now Freshman members of Congress are at a “Bipartisan” orientation w/ briefings on issues. Invited panelists offer insights to inform new Congressmembers‘ views as they prepare to legislate. # of Corporate CEOs we’ve listened to here: 4 # of Labor leaders: 0 *Our “bipartisan” Congressional orientation is cohosted by a corporate lobbyist group. Other members have quietly expressed to me their concern that this wasn’t told to us in advance. Lobbyists are here. Goldman Sachs is here. Where‘s labor? Activists? Frontline community leaders?"

"The age difference between myself (29) + oldest House members is ~60yrs. For better or worse, young people will live in the world Congress leaves behind. That’s why I focus on our future: addressing climate change & runaway income inequality, ending school-to-prison pipelines, etc."

"The mentorship of elders is what got me here. In Latinx + Indigenous communities, elder is an honorific that doesn’t come with age - it comes w/ univ acknowledgement of wisdom. But to delay large action on climate doesn’t include the wisdom of elders nor the urgency of youth."

"I have spoken in the past about how youth is not an embodiment of age, but of attitude - a willingness to risk for what is right, among others. We also shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge the dearth of young elected officials + those implications."

"True love is radical because it requires us to see ourselves in all people. Otherwise, it isn’t love. Love is revolutionary because it has us treat ALL people as we would ourselves - not because we are charitable, but because we are one. That is love’s radical conclusion."

"We should aim to work for an America where developing our potential through college or vocational education isn’t a gift or luxury, but a matter of course guaranteed by society. Just like K-12. Until then, I am so thankful for those who move heaven + earth to give kids a shot."

"Don’t be fooled by the plaques that we got, I’m still / I’m still Alex from the Bronx"

"This time a year ago, I was bartending while running a long-shot campaign for Congress. That time felt so dark and yet so hopeful at the same time. Our odds were dismal + I was dismissed, but we felt that fighting hard for what’s right - even uphill - was worth it. Keep going."

"I have three months without a salary before I'm a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real"

"Everybody knows someone in their life that is already an amazing public servant... Nominate that amazing public servant to take their service to the halls of Congress. Give them that nudge. My brother did it for me."

"His (president Trump's) job is to find solutions, analyze and adapt in real time to keep people safe in one of the busiest air spaces in the United States and the world...And it is terrifying to think that almost every single air traffic controller in the United States is currently distracted at work because they don’t know when their next paycheck is coming."

"It is actually not about a wall, it is not about the border, and it is certainly not about the well-being of everyday Americans... The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms."

"I think it’s great that we have multiple female presidential candidates, so there’s not the woman running... I’m very excited about there being multiple women... that can represent different parts of the political spectrum on the left, so that’s something that I’m thankful for... what we’re trying to do is is frame the debate and the conversation... that we’re going to be having in the next two years..."

"I do not think that for the future of humanity, and for our country to continue to prosper, that we cannot have another presidential cycle where climate change is not being asked about at almost every debate, and that includes the role of fossil fuel, fossil fuel industries, and that includes the role of a broad spectrum of issues."

"Black folks are descendants of slaves that were imported, quote-unquote by slave owners, to the United States for the explicit purpose of cultivating crops. And it was predicated on white supremacy and racial superiority, but we have to understand that white supremacy exists for a reason, and they exist for a very specific cultural and economic reasons. And LBJ talked about this — like, if you can convince a poor white man that he’s superior to a black man, he’ll empty his pockets for you. And so it’s not just economic reasons why racism exists but there are economic reasons why racism is perpetuated and incentivized. More of that’s housing, income, et cetera. And like I said on Monday with Ta-Nehisi, until America tells the truth about itself we’re never going to heal. And this — it’s like this thing that as a culture we hide... it’s like this big wound with a big ugly scab on it, and it’s just going to stay this itchy thing that we keep going back to until we just deal with it."

"Even the solutions that we have considered big and bold are nowhere near the scale of the actual problem that climate change presents to us... It could be part of a larger solution, but no one has actually scoped out what that larger solution would entail. And so that's really what we're trying to accomplish with the Green New Deal."

"I do think that when there's a wide spectrum of debate on an issue, that is where the public plays a role. That is where the public needs to call their member of Congress and say, 'This is something that I care about,'...Where I do have trust is in my colleagues' capacity to change and evolve and be adaptable and listen to their constituents.""

"Reminder that their plan = no plan. Why? Because for billionaires, things are already going fine."

"The thing that people don’t understand about restaurants is that they’re one of the most political environments. You’re shoulder-to-shoulder with immigrants. You’re at one of the nexuses of income inequality. Your hourly wage is even less than the minimum wage. You’re working for tips. You’re getting sexually harassed."

"I was actually talking to a Republican House member on the floor, and he’s like, “Are you a communist?... It’s OK if you are.” And I just started laughing because that is exactly how Fox News wants to go."

"I do think that we’ve been taking it too much. I think we’ve been tolerating the intolerable."

"The last time I was pissed was the president’s bullshit border address, watching this guy just be racist from the Oval Office. I saw it as a defilement. In terms of how we channel it, we just take that anger and that energy and use it to say, “This is why we need the moonshot.”"

"I think it’s wrong to say that what I’m proposing is polarizing the country. What we are seeing now is a ruling class of corporations and a very small elite that have captured government. The Koch brothers own every Republican in the Senate. They own ’em. They don’t cast a vote unless their sugar daddies tell ’em what to do. But 70 percent of Americans believe in Medicare for all. Ninety percent of Americans believe we need to get money out of politics. Eighty-something [percent] believe that climate change is a real, systemic and urgent problem. Sixty-seven percent of Americans believe that immigrants are a positive force in the United States of America. I believe that I’m fighting for the American consensus."

"I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of."

"I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person. I knew that I was not going to be liked. I’m a Democrat. I’m a woman. I’m a young woman. A Latina. And I’m a liberal, a D.S.A. member,” she said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “I believe health care is a right and people should be paid enough to live. Those are offensive values to them. But this ravenous hysteria—it’s really getting to a level that is kind of out of control. It’s dangerous and even scary. I have days when it seems some people want to stoke just enough of it to have just enough plausible deniability if something happens to me."

"So the way I have conversations with people of opposing beliefs is I don't try to convince them of anything. So that's the first step trying to win people over. Stop trying to enter a conversation thinking that you're gonna like aah-ha them into changing their mind. I think that you know, we've kind of lost the art of conversation. So when I enter a conversation with someone I actually try to learn more about where they're coming from. Like I try I actually use it as an experience... let's say I'm talking to someone who's saying something really racist and they don't even realize that they're saying something really racist. I ask some questions because I'm interested. I'm fascinated by that. How does that work, you know? I don't do it in a way that's like mocking but I ask questions. We have to learn to really disarm ourselves in these conversations. First of all because we approach them with so much hostility and they get mad and we get mad and all of these things and so part of it is like emotional work and The second part of it is intention. Like what are you trying to get out of this conversation? And if you're just trying to argue with someone, it's not gonna work You know, you believe what you believe they believe what they believe. So I think the thing that we have to do is try to have a good faith interaction of trying to learn more about where the other person comes from because often what I find, is that when I do win people over It's almost never in the conversation itself that I've won someone over. Its that I have a conversation with someone, I asked them some critical questions and I calmly explained to them: well, this is where I'm coming from and this is why I believe what I believe why do you believe what you believe? And you kind of like leave the conversation but very often that person will sit on what you said and they will sit on the fact that you respected them and gave them space and then very often I've had interactions like that and I'll run into that person again a week later a month later and they said you know what? You said something that I really thought about and I changed my mind...But if you rush in, you know fully-armored up, attacking them and making them feel defensive they will never listen to anything that you have to say. So it's really about learning how how we can have a conversation again."

"When we talk about the concern of the environment as an elitist concern, one year ago I was waitressing in a taco shop in Downtown Manhattan. I just got health insurance for the first time a month ago. This is not an elitist issue; this is a quality-of-life issue. You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist? Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids have—their blood is ascending in lead levels. Their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives. Call them elitist... People are dying. This should not be a partisan issue. This is about our constituents and all of our lives. Iowa, Nebraska, broad swaths of the Midwest are drowning right now, underwater. Farms, towns that will never be recovered and never come back. And we’re here, and people are more concerned about helping oil companies than helping their own families? I don’t think so...This is about American lives. And it should not be partisan. Science should not be partisan. We are facing a national crisis. And if... if we tell the American public that we are more willing to invest and bail out big banks than we are willing to invest in our farmers and our urban families, then I don’t know what we’re here doing..."

"The DCCC's new rule to blacklist + boycott anyone who does business with primary challengers is extremely divisive and harmful to the party... My recommendation, if you're a small-dollar donor: pause your donations to DCCC and give directly to swing candidates instead.""

"No lawmaker should be cashing in on their public service and selling their contacts and expertise to the highest bidder... don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in Congress. Keeping it real, the elephant in the room with passing a lobbying ban on members requires a nearly-impossible discussion about congressional pay."

"Any job that pays $2.13 an hour is not a job, it is indentured servitude... All labor has dignity, and the way that we give labor dignity is by paying people the respect and value that they are worth at minimum... When we talk about tipped wages, people think of this industry, people think of bartenders and they think of waitresses.. But they don't think about nail salon workers, they don't think about car wash attendants. They don't think about these people that, so many of us don't even know, are depending on our tips, too."

"A few social media ideas for public servants looking to build an audience: - Endorse Single-Payer Medicare for All, - Hold Wall Street Accountable, - Make Min Wage = Living Wage, - Cancel Puerto Rican Debt, - End For-Profit Prisons & ICE Detention, - Fight for a #GreenNewDeal"

"A few more ways to gain traction: - Support a Federal Jobs Guarantee, - Bailout Student Debt, - Legalize Marijuana & Explore Reparations, Baby Bonds. Here’s our Student Loan Cancellation Digital Town Hall..."

"Many people ask what a Green New Deal entails. We are calling for a wartime-level, just economic mobilization plan to get to 100% renewable energy ASAP. To read more, check out..."

"Congresswomen dance too!"

"When you look at how he reacted to the Charlottesville incident, where neo-Nazis murdered a woman, versus how he manufactures crises like immigrants seeking legal refuge on our borders, it’s—it’s night and day."

"Financial Services is one of just four exclusive committees in the House. It oversees big banks, lending, & the financial sector...."

"Personally, I’m looking forward to digging into the student loan crisis, examining for-profit prisons/ICE detention, and exploring the development of public & postal banking. To start."

"Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?"

"Me: “I don’t think billionaires should concentrate wealth while employing people who are sleeping in cars working a zillion hours to survive.” Next day: “That will be TEN PINOCCHIOS to Ocasio, ‘zillion’ is not a number and I found someone who sleeps in a tent, not a car.”"

"You shouldn’t need a Bible to tell you to protect our planet, but it does anyway."

"For too long, we’ve been told “no” to a substantially better future - that the America that went to the moon, pursued the Great Society & electrified the nation is no longer possible. I disagree. Instead, let’s break past our self-defined limits and redefine what’s possible."

"There are multiple doctored GND resolutions and FAQs floating around. There was also a draft version that got uploaded + taken down. There’s also draft versions floating out there. Point is, the real one is our submitted resolution, H.Res. 109: (link redirect to) https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text"

"Our future is imperiled, our economy is fragile, and frontline communities are vulnerable to major threats from rising sea levels to lead in our water. A #GreenNewDeal is a common sense, moral solution to fix these issues with the urgency they demand."

"Leadership starts with our choices. That’s why I decided that no one on my staff will make less than $52k/year. It’s likely one of the highest entry-level salaries on the Hill. We pinch pennies elsewhere, but it’s worth every dime to pay a living wage."

"It’s pretty sad that people think low Congressional staff pay is a good thing. Low pay a big reason why money in politics is a problem - you can make a lot more money becoming a lobbyist & setting up a relationship w/ one, since the actual job doesn’t pay enough."

"A lot of people commenting don’t know how Congressional salaries work. Each member is given a set amount that they disburse. GOP has refused to increase budgets in years to give hard-working staff a raise, which means people helping to run the country are getting paid $30k/year."

"The GOP is so disconnected from the basic idea that people should be paid enough to live that Fox actually thinks me paying a living wage in my office is “communism.” So the next time GOP screams “socialist,” know that’s their go-to attack for any common-sense, humane policy."

"GOP defensively say, “we’re not scared of dancing women!” yet proceed to use footage of me dancing “with the color drained to make it look more ominous.” 🤣 Spoiler: The GOP *is* scared of dancing women, because they fear the liberation of all identities taught to feel shame."

"I guess WSJ Editorial Page takes pride in their ignorance of our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, & mass incarceration; willful doubt on the decades of science on climate change; targeting of indigenous peoples, and the classist, punitive agenda targeting working families."

"At [DHS immigrant detention] facility, children recounted being held down for forcible injections, which medical records show are powerful antipsychotics and sedatives. I think an agency that pins children down + forcibly injects them w/ antipsychotic drugs shouldn’t be given more power."

"What I DID say was that I had to go back to my district & share the MTR vote to explain why a pro-ICE amendment was slipped into a gun safety law. Maybe they’re mad bc I don’t believe pro-ICE expansion votes should be cast in the dark, and people deserve to know what happened."

"MomsDemand & #MarchForOurLives activists, who flew in from across the country, were watching from the gallery, crying + confused. I ran up to them *during the vote* and explained that the gotcha amendment pinned gun safety against immigration advocacy. Its intent was to divide."

"Mind you, the same small splinter group of Dems that tried to deny Pelosi the speakership, fund the wall during the shutdown when the public didn’t want it, & are now voting in surprise ICE amendments... are being called the “moderate wing” of the party."

"I was upset that 26 Dems forced the other 200+ to vote for a pro-ICE provision at the last min without warning... We can have ideological differences and that’s fine. But these tactics allow a small group to force the other 200+ members into actions that the majority disagree with. I don’t think that’s right, and said as much in a closed door meeting."

"If you’re mad that I think people SHOULD KNOW when Dems vote to expand ICE powers, then be mad. ICE is a dangerous agency with 0 accountability, widespread reporting of rape, abuse of power, + children dying in DHS custody. Having a D next to your name doesn’t make that right."

"The entire PREMISE of a wall is not based in fact. It’s based in a racist + non-evidence based trope that immigrants are dangerous. Yet some Dems are willing to “compromise” & spend BILLIONS on a trope because we’ve accepted some kinds of racism as realpolitik in America."

"Sandy Hook happened 6 years ago and we can’t even get the Senate to hold a vote on universal background checks w/ #HR8. Christchurch happened, and within days New Zealand acted to get weapons of war out of the consumer market. This is what leadership looks like. (Her tweet pointed to a tweet with quote from New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Arden “Today I am announcing that New Zealand will ban all military-style semi-automatic weapons.”)"

"Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today. @IlhanMN’s life is in danger. For our colleagues to be silent is to be complicit in the outright, dangerous targeting of a member of Congress. We must speak out. “First they came...”"

"This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows."

"AOC to: @tedcruz if you’re serious about a clean bill, then I’m down.Let’s make a deal. If we can agree on a bill with no partisan snuck-in clauses, no poison pills, etc - just a straight, clean ban on members of Congress becoming paid lobbyists - then I’ll co-lead the bill with you."

"Any job that pays $2.13 an hour is not a job. It's indentured servitude. All labor has dignity and the way that we give labor dignity is by paying people the respect and the value that they are worth... We have to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour."

"The GOP is working overtime to dismantle labor unions, which are exceedingly popular with the American public. Unions secure higher wages and better work conditions. We should support them, even if we’re not in one. (Or look into unionization in your industry!)"

"Seems like Trump’s DOT Secretary, Elaine Chao,has been caught trying to use her position to enrich her family’s shipping company. Her husband has lots of sway in US laws, too: Mitch McConnell. At this point it might be easier to ask where in this admin there *isn’t* corruption."

"I think he should apologize for the deliberate conflation and attack on these terms"

"Are we headed to fascism? Yes. I don’t think there’s a question... If you actually take the time to study, and to look at the steps, and to see how government transforms under authoritarian regimes, and look at the political decisions and patterns of this president, the answer is yes."

"I see why CBP officers were being so physically and sexually threatening towards me... Officers were keeping women in cells w/ no water & had told them to drink out of the toilets. This was them on their GOOD behavior in front of members of Congress."

"We withdrew U.S. aid to those areas that was intended to stabilize those areas... It deepened and exacerbated all of the crises that are already happening, causing a flood of people to try to escape these horrifying conditions. So we are contributing to the surge in the first place. We’re engineering it, so that’s coming to our border."

"No child should ever be separated from their parent. No child should ever taken from their family. No woman should ever be locked up in a pen when they have done no harm to another human being."

"I can’t understate how disturbing it was that CBP officers were openly disrespectful of the Congressional tour. If officers felt comfortable violating agreements in front of their *own* management & superiors, that tells us the agency has lost all control of their own officers. Congresswoman Madeleine Dean: We were met with hostility from the guards, but this is nothing compared to their treatment of the people being held. The detainees are constantly abused and verbally harassed with no cause. Deprived physically and dehumanized mentally - everyday."

"Even if they let you in, these women told us CBP did a lot of “cleaning up” before we arrived. They were moved into that room from outside tents before our arrival. They said they’d gone 15 days w/o a shower, & were allowed to start bathing 4 days ago (when visit was announced)."

"Members of Congress had to surrender their phones before today’s CBP trip. But @JoaquinCastrotx was able to get a device in. This photo is of the women we spoke to. We asked their permission to photograph - they said yes, please share what’s happening."

"Meanwhile, one refrain we‘ve heard is that people are overcrowded in CBP concentration camps because the shelters (which are humane places where families can stay together) are full. So we went to a shelter. They said that wasn’t true at all. Only 150/500 spots were filled."

"What’s haunting is that the women I met with today told me in no uncertain terms that they would experience retribution for telling us what they shared. They all began sobbing - out of fear of being punished, out of sickness, out of desperation, lack of sleep, trauma, despair."

"I actually think I have a lot of common ground with many libertarian viewpoints… True libertarians, which many happen to be in the Republican Party, true libertarian viewpoints are pro-immigration."

"Susan Collins is not a moderate. She just plays one on TV."

"People really need to ask themselves why their communities chose to erect statues to slaveholders instead of abolitionists."

"Billionaires need the working class. The working class does not need billionaires."

"Good evening, ​bienvenidos​, and thank you to everyone here today endeavoring towards a better, more just future for our country and our world."

"In a time when millions of people in the United States are looking for deep systemic solutions to our crises of mass evictions, unemployment and lack of health care, and ​espíritu del pueblo​ and out of a love for all people, I hereby second the nomination of Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont for president of the United States of America. (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks via video feed during the second day of the Democratic National Convention on August 18, 2020)"

"Aggressive, overreaching wealth redistribution *does* happen in the United States, it just happens in the opposite direction conservatives scream about: our system takes money away from everyday people and siphons it towards the profanely wealthy."

"If we are only organizing for elections, we are not going to win the world that we need...No one politician is the answer. No one president is the answer. You are the answer, mass movements are the answer."

"I hope people realize that the same Republicans who are refusing to acknowledge the results of our elections also champion disastrous foreign policy claiming they're "bringing democracy" to other nations."

"There are already communities actively experimenting and developing solutions… What I work on is not how we find solutions but how we scale to transform our society...there’s the writing by Arundhati Roy, which is that another world is not only possible, but it is already here. And finding the pockets where this world has arrived, is what gives me hope. The Bronx has one of the highest per capita rates of worker cooperatives in the world. That is a new economy in our borough of millions of people. And so whether it’s that, whether it is discussions around mass incarceration, abolitionists organizing, not just, you know, what does it mean to dismantle the jail, but what does it mean to reorganize the society so that we do not have people engaged in antisocial behavior on such a scale that we have today, or that we don’t have antisocial systems... These are not just theoretical conversations that people are having, but there are communities that are actively experimenting and developing solutions.... What I work on is not how do we find solutions, but how do we scale the solutions that we’ve already developed to transform our society. And that is work that breaks our cycles of cynicism. Cynicism, I think is a far greater enemy to the left than many others, because it is the tool that is given to us to hurt ourselves. And hope creates action and action creates hope. And that’s how we scale forward."

"I do think that there is a dam breaking, both in electoral politics, but also in organizing beyond our electoral system. Like what we’re seeing with the precipitation of strikes on a scale that really has not been seen in many years.. It’s a bit of an emperor with no clothes type of situation for our political establishment and our capitalist systems where people are beginning to realize that once we name these systems and describe them, that this water that they are, that people have been swimming in, actually has a name. And there is alternative that people can come up for air if we try to explore alternative ways of doing things... After I won, there was such a large concerted attempt, and continues to be a large-concerted attempt by media to marginalize, not just my victory, but what happened in our community... you have the former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, within days saying this was a complete accident. You had every, every major of elected official and Democratic Party member trying to dismiss what happened. And the thing is that it didn’t stop. There would be a case for that if I was the only victory that occurred. But the fact of the matter is that simply wasn’t the case that had the election ’cause people also naming systems and talking about what was previously extraordinarily politically taboo."

"What is so intertwined in this discussion is that this is not just also about open critiques of capitalism, but also open critiques of white supremacy. And it’s in greater understanding of white supremacy, not as just, you know, these social, these racist, social clubs of people dawning hoods, but actually as a system and a systems understanding of how white supremacy has interacted with the development of the United States. And so the way that that ties back in is that so many of these essential labor forces are dominated by women and women of color, whether it’s fast food workers or whether it’s nurses or whether it’s childcare and teaching professions, this, what I would say this capitalist class calls a labor shortage, in what is actually a dignified work shortage, is concentrated overwhelmingly in working class people, a multi-racial working class, but also in professions that are dominated by women and women of color."

"1. Policy- Passing BIF without BBB is a huge gamble. People will point to pro-climate investments in BIF, but the oil & gas giveaways wipe out its progress to 0 or risk worse emissions. Passing BBB unlocks BIF climate perks"

"2. Political - there were many, many promises made to get to Friday’s passage. Promises from mod Dems, House leadership, and the President himself."

"If those promises do not get fulfilled, it will make future passage of anything much more difficult. BIF will look like a cakewalk"

"In Washington, I usually know my questions of power are getting somewhere when the powerful stop referring to me as “Congresswoman” and start referring to me as “young lady” instead"

"“Imagine if every time someone referred to someone as ‘young lady’ they were responded to by being addressed with their age and gender? They’d be pretty upset if one responded with ‘the old man’, right? Why this kind of weird, patronizing behavior is so accepted is beyond me!”"

"Six weeks pregnant means two weeks late for your period... And two weeks late on your period for any person -- any person with a menstrual cycle -- can happen if you're stressed, if your diet changes or for really no reason at all. So you don't have six weeks."

"The majority of people who are raped, and who are sexually assaulted, are assaulted by someone they know. These aren’t just predators who are walking around the streets at night. They are people's uncles, they are teachers, they are family friends, and when something like that happens, it takes a very long time, first of all, for any victim to come forward. And second of all, when a victim comes forward, they don't necessarily want to bring their case into the carceral system. They don't want to re-traumatize themselves by going to court. They don't necessarily all want to report a family friend to a police precinct, let alone in the immediate aftermath of the trauma of a sexual assault."

"I'm sorry we have to break down Biology 101 on national television, but in case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late for your period. And two weeks late on your period for any person -- any person with a menstrual cycle -- can happen if you're stressed, if your diet changes or for really no reason at all. So you don't have six weeks."

"The value of human rights is really the path to peace here...That’s a central thing that we need to make sure that we value the safety and the human rights of Israelis and we value the safety and human rights of Palestinians in that process that is similar on equal footing... Just like here in the United States, I don’t believe that children should be detained. I think that starting on those basic principles of human rights, we can build a path to peace together... We really need to make sure that we are valuing a process where all parties are respected, and have a lot of equal opportunity to really make sure that we are negotiating in good faith."

"Apartheid states aren’t democracies."

"It is utterly embarrassing that “pay people enough to live” is a stance that’s even up for debate."

"Charity can’t replace policy, but solidarity is how we’ll face climate change and build a better world."

"Republicans could trip over their own shoelaces and they’d still find a way to blame me, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, the Green New Deal, BLM, anything but accept responsibility for their own actions and dealings. Ineptitude, bigotry, and corruption. Disasters in their own right."

"Billionaires be like “the extreme far left is taking over” when the “extreme far left” in the US is “medicine shouldn’t bankrupt you,” “wages should cover rent,” & “maybe it’s bad that Wall St companies profit off mass surveillance, manufactured housing crises, and caging people”"

"We could protect Roe tomorrow, but Sinema refuses to act on the filibuster. Until that changes she can take a seat talking about 'women’s access to health care.' Hold everyone contributing to this disaster accountable, GOP & Dem obstructionists included. She should be primaried."

"There is no such thing as being “pro-life” while supporting laws that let children be shot in their schools, elders in grocery stores, worshippers in their houses of faith, survivors by abusers, or anyone in a crowded place."

"Overturning Roe and outlawing abortions will never make them go away. It only makes them more dangerous, especially for the poor + marginalized. People will die because of this decision. And we will never stop until abortion rights are restored in the United States of America."

"Let’s be real: there’s a WHOLE lot of men whose lives, careers, and families have benefited from an abortion (including several “pro-life” GOP Congressmen). Men, we need you right now. You can get through in rooms others can’t. Your power matters. Speak up. This is about us all."

"Forced pregnancy is a crime against humanity."

"Yesterday, a man sharing that member’s rhetoric tried to assassinate the Speaker and her spouse. What has @GOPLeader said? Nothing. This is who he is"

"the way that we create urgency on the issue of climate is when we have people all across the world in the streets — in the streets — showing up, demanding change and demanding a cessation of what is killing us. We have to send the message that some of us are going to be living on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now, and we will not take “no” for an answer. Climate must be a centerpiece of inside and outside organizing, an electoral and a popular force that cannot be ignored. This issue is one of the issues, the biggest issue of our time, and because of that, we must be too big and too radical to ignore."

"Don’t let the cynics win. The cynics want us to think that this isn’t worth it. The cynics want us to believe that we can’t win. The cynics want us to believe that organizing doesn’t matter, that our political system doesn’t matter, that our economy doesn’t matter. And we’re here to say that we organize out of hope. We organize out of commitment. We organize out of love! We organize out of the beauty of our future! And we will not give up! We will not let go! We will not allow cynicism to prevail. We will not allow our visions of a collaborative economy, of dignity for working people, of honoring the Black, Brown, Indigenous, white working class — we will not give up!"

"They said: 'We can do it all. We can fight for our families held hostage by Hamas, stand against occupation, stand with impacted Israelis, stand up for innocent Palestinians"

"at the end of the day, I haven’t changed a single policy position that I originally ran on. I have all of the same exact convictions, values, policy commitments. I’ve just gotten better at executing on them. And I understand that my role is in that inside-outside political strategy that the left has built an increasingly sophisticated outside, but we have an anemic inside. And I feel like right now my role is to build a juggernaut of momentum. And goddamn, honestly, if we can get to a place where a regular old Democrat believes in trust-busting and a regular old Democrat believes in a full path to citizenship, and Medicare for All, and combating climate change, and a Green New Deal, fuck yeah. That’s literally what my goal was from the beginning. My goal has always been to bring the mainstream to me, and in the process, have my beliefs be mainstream."

"I will not yield because it was a terribly disrespectful comment, and I will not yield to disrespectful men."

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would become a hugely visible and audible figure and a significant voice for progressive issues. She sponsored the Green New Deal in the House of Representatives in February 2019, little more than a year after taking her oath of office. Notice the confluence of Standing Rock, the Justice Democrats, Sunrise, and this young woman's life. She said, "I was really wallowing in despair for a while: What do I do? Is this my life? Just showing up, working, knowing that things are so difficult, then going home and doing it again. And I think what was profoundly liberating was engaging in my first action-when I went to Standing Rock, in the Dakotas, to fight against a fracking pipeline. It seemed impossible at the time. It was just normal people, showing up, just standing on the land to prevent this pipeline from going through. And it made me feel extremely powerful, even though we had nothing, materially-just the act of standing up to some of the most powerful corporations in the world. From there I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope." She went from looking for hope to making it, through her work on many issues and her brilliant leadership on key issues for the country and the world, including climate."

"It was there that I met Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She knew about all that we'd accomplished in Ferguson, and I was immediately struck by her fierceness and clarity of vision."

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., slammed Abbott in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on Tuesday, saying he lacks basic knowledge of biology. "I'm sorry we have to break down Biology 101 on national television, but in case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late for your period," Ocasio-Cortez said. "And two weeks late on your period ... can happen if you're stressed, if your diet changes or for really no reason at all. So you don't have six weeks.""

"Ocasio-Cortez also took issue with Abbott's comments on rape, noting that the majority of people who are raped or sexually assaulted are assaulted by someone whom they know. The anti-sexual violence nonprofit RAINN says 8 out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. "These aren't just predators that are walking around the streets at night. They are people's uncles, they are teachers, they are family friends, and when something like that happens, it takes a very long time, first of all, for any victim to come forward," Ocasio-Cortez added. "And second of all, when a victim comes forward, they don't necessarily want to bring their case into the carceral system.""

"One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged. Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated. Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google."

"People compared my election (in 2018) to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s. In both districts of roughly a little more than 700,000 people, it was a good day for democracy."

"Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion energy plan Tuesday with a heavy focus on the Green New Deal agenda being pushed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-left flank of his party. Speaking in Wilmington, Del., Biden promised a “clean energy revolution,”... Biden’s announcement comes as the presidential wannabe courts idols on the left of his party including Bronx-Queens Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the hope that they will support him and steer young voters his way in November. In May, AOC announced she had been selected to co-chair Biden’s climate change panel along with former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. In a statement to Reuters after news broke that AOC was joining Biden’s climate change panel, a spokesperson for the Democratic socialist said the congresswoman believed in applying pressure “both inside and outside the system.”"

"This is the hood that spawned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the country’s most privileged revolutionaries. She called herself Sandy Cortez back then. She imagined that every place could be just like Yorktown Heights if only we got rid of the police. Apparently, she still believes that."

"This entire interview is real but this by AOC stands out: "So I need my colleagues to understand that ... their base is not the enemy.""

"The best part of the night, by any metric, was the eye-blink time slot afforded Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to second Bernie Sanders’s nomination. Her remarks were a song, a poem of hope and defiance, and they speak better for themselves than I ever could... One minute and 37 seconds out of a program two hours in length, and Representative Ocasio-Cortez made the most of all of it. Imagine if she had been given the same amount of time as Kasich, or Powell, or even the commercials CNN ran during the roll call? Well, maybe by 2024, the Democratic establishment will have realized which way the tide is running, Biden or no Biden, and give the ever-rising progressive wing of the party its due."

"Four of the most dynamic women of color in Congress – representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib"

"Pretty incredible that centrists are allowed to directly blame AOC for losing their own races but when AOC defends herself by pointing out that they rejected her help while the candidates who accepted her help in swing districts won she gets accused of dividing her party."

"AOC embodies the kind of leadership we dream of: brilliant, courageous, and gifted, with a quick mind and an understanding of our history and the political moment from which she emerged. And most importantly to me, she believes in environmental justice."

"Ocasio-Cortez... has repeatedly called out Trump in the past month over his immigration policies, and has compared migrant detention facilities near the southern border to concentration camps. The comparison prompted backlash from multiple GOP lawmakers, who called her remarks disrespectful to the Holocaust and the millions of Jews killed during it. Ocasio-Cortez has stood by her comments, saying she would "never apologize for calling these camps what they are." The New York congresswoman reiterated her stance to Yahoo News, arguing that Trump's tendencies compared to that time period. She also held the president directly responsible for the poor conditions at the migrant detention facilities, saying his policies have led to numerous Central Americans fleeing their native countries."

"The right doesn’t dislike @AOC because she's ineffective. They despise her precisely because she communicates boldly, passionately and in a Twitter-native manner. When AOC talks, Republicans know they are losing."

"Stop the handwringing about @aoc and concentration camps. First of all, she's right. Second of all, she has single-handedly forced a debate about the barbaric and inhumane treatment of migrants at our Southern Border. She is smart, moral and correct."

"We see...Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC ... they’re all out there saying, look, we need to do something about corporate greed... the way that they were involved with loans... Over the most of the 20th century... you had caps... And then all of a sudden there was deregulation. And when deregulation took place, all of this bad stuff started occurring. You know, Wall Street stole from mom and pop. The economy crashed."

"Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders just put postal banking back where it belongs: high on the agenda of those who seek to create a just and equitable United States. On Thursday, the pair drew national attention with the announcement of their Loan Shark Prevention Act, a sweeping plan to “combat the predatory lending practices of America’s big banks and protect consumers who are burdened with exorbitant credit-card interest rates. The legislation imposes a 15 percent federal cap on interest rates and empowers individual states to establish lower limits.” ...modern-day loan sharks... work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions...and head financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America... Despite what the knee-jerk anti-government echo chamber may tell you, what Americans need now is banking that serves people, not the Wall Street speculators. American Postal Workers Union president Mark Dimondstein...says that the USPS can and should answer the call with “a nonprofit alternative to the big banks”..."

"I don't think that she knows who Adam Smith was."

"Denouncing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's new policy of cutting off firms that work with primary challengers as "divisive" and "harmful," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday advised small-dollar donors to stop giving money to the DCCC and instead donate to progressive candidates directly."

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows the power she wields as a woman makes some people very uncomfortable ― and she’s learning to use that to her advantage. “The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with,“ the freshman Democrat from New York told The New Yorker in an interview published Monday. “But I am as powerful as a man and it drives them crazy.” Being the object of a sexist label, Ocasio-Cortez said, is helpful in one area: It really throws off her adversaries, including President Donald Trump."

"“I can see Trump being enormously upset that a twenty-nine-year-old Latina, who is the daughter of a domestic worker, is helping to build the case to get his financial records,” she said. “I think that adds insult to injury to him.”"

"Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get the food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death."

"Patrick Moore, as reported in ‘Pompous twit will get us all killed’: AOC tweet-tacked over Green New Deal by ex-Greenpeace founder, 3 Mar, 2019 21:19, Russia Today"

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) went viral again yesterday... thanks to her sharp questioning of Michael Cohen at the House oversight committee hearing... The freshman New York congresswoman “expertly laid a trap” to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns, and “won” the Cohen hearing, according to two raving press accounts. Ocasio-Cortez’s testimony focused primarily on Trump’s alleged deflation of his financial assets in order to lower his tax burden. First, she zeroed in on Trump Links, a golf course in Ocasio-Cortez’s district that was constructed with $127 million in city taxpayer funds. “This doesn’t seem to be the only time the president has benefited at the expense of the public,” Ocasio-Cortez said, pivoting to the heart of the matter: Whether Trump deliberately deflated the value of Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, to lower his local property tax bill. Her knack for clever questioning, which is a marked contrast with other members’ preference for grandstanding, is ultimately rooted in a commitment to moving the needle for her constituents."

"One advantage Ocasio-Cortez has over some colleagues is that she consistently attends even the most mundane committee hearings, since she does not spend any of her day calling donors for money. Her online presence is strong enough that she has chosen to rely on it exclusively to raise contributions in smaller increments."

"A viral video of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using a "Corruption Game" to highlight the need for campaign finance reform during a House Oversight Committee hearing last Wednesday has become the most viewed video of any politician in Twitter history... the 29-year-old lawmaker... [highlighted how easy & legal it is for politicians to] enrich themselves... Her examples ranged from taking "special interest dark money" from corporate PACs to fund a campaign to using hush money payments to make potential scandals disappear and writing laws that benefit donors and then buying stocks in their companies for personal financial gain."

"During a hearing, the freshman lawmaker created a game in which she pretended to be “a really, really bad guy” who wants to abuse the system as much as possible. Then, in a series of questions, she exposed the world of payoffs, dark money, PACs and more. She even revealed how it was perfectly legal for a lawmaker to invest in an industry, then write laws to benefit that industry."

"@AOC is on NPR talking about funding the Green New Deal by decoupling tax revenue from government spending. Heads are exploding across Washington."

"Not doing a Green New Deal for lack of tax revenue would be like a beaver saying it just can’t afford to build a dam. If you’ve got the sticks and the labor, build the damn dam."

"Sure, polls show 70 percent of Americans support Medicare-for-all, 74 percent support a wealth tax such as the one proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax rate finds comfortable majority support. But … socialism! Surely not... Trump would have us believe that these are our only two choices: We can either have smash-and-grab capitalism, where so many hands in the cookie jar has resulted in so many government scandals, and where the top 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, or we can have what’s happening in Venezuela, where the economy has collapsed and humanitarian and political crises have ensued..."

"Trump’s dig on socialism means he’s scared, Ocasio-Cortez said after his speech. What really scares the pro-plutocrats on both sides of the political aisle about her, Sanders and other democratic socialists is that they have become messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision — the simple idea that it’s up to government to intervene and equalize the playing field between the capital that owns the politicians, the system and the rewards, and the general public toiling to provide those rewards. Everybody deserves to live a life of dignity, with their bare-minimum needs met in... “the richest society in history of the world.” It’s an idea whose time has come..."

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., think they have a start to a [climate change] solution... They are introducing... a "Green New Deal", The bill calls for a "10-year national mobilizations" toward accomplishing a series of goals... Among the most prominent... meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources... ultimate goal is to stop using fossil fuels entirely... to transition away from nuclear energy In addition... a variety of other lofty goals....upgrading all existing buildings... for energy efficiency.... working with farmers "to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions... as much as is technologically feasible....while supporting family farms and promoting "universal access to healthy food... Overhauling transportation systems... expanding electric car manufacturing... charging stations everywhere... expanding high-speed rail to "a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary".... guaranteed job "with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family... medical leave, paid vacations.... retirement security.... High-quality health care for all Americans..."

"A C-SPAN tweet of her nearly four-minute speech garnered 1.16 million views in a little more than 12 hours, setting a record for the most-watched Twitter video from the outlet of any remarks by a House member, according to a tweet from Howard Mortman, C-SPAN’s communications director. By Friday morning, it had surpassed 2.3 million views."

"It’s no accident that this Green New Deal has been championed by a legislator not yet 30. It’s Ocasio-Cortez’s generation who’ll bear the full brunt of the results of three decades of legislative inertia on climate change. All of us owe it to her generation and future ones to ensure that the political and economic choices she and others face in 20 years won’t be even worse because of our failure of leadership, nerve and imagination today. Timely support of this bold new deal, and the principles it stands for, may in fact be our only hope."

"Earlier this month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floated the idea of a 70 percent tax rate on incomes over $10 million....The irony of all this is that AOC’s tax proposal finds inspiration not in Karl Marx, but in mainstream American political philosophy... AOC’s proposal reflects a surprisingly moderate view of economic justice. Her plan can trace its intellectual lineage to John Rawls, the giant of American political philosophy. Central to Rawls’ philosophy is a defense of inequality... A rising tide is just, as long as it lifts all boats. John Rawls would applaud AOC’s tax as being wholly consistent with the principles of justice... just 16,000 Americans make more than $10 million per year... literally the 1 percent of the 1 percent."

"In the last few days... Politico and the New York Times have reported that freshman Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has ruffled the feathers of fellow congressional Democrats... Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent support for progressive primary challenges against centrist Democrats... [is] one of the most significant ideas the young New York congresswoman has brought... The corporate Democrats who dominate the party’s power structure in Congress should fear losing their seats... And Democratic voters should understand that if they want to change the party, the only path to do so is to change the people who represent them."

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez clearly has superpowers. When was the last time a freshman member of Congress was able to not just vault policy issues up the agenda with a remark in an interview or a visit to a protest, but whip much of Washington into such a frenzy of consternation and jealousy?...A young, charismatic, unapologetically progressive Latina booting out a doughy-looking old-school white guy...? ...She has shown some unusual skills... that seem to be driving Republicans absolutely nuts. Despite the occasional misstep, she seems earnest and even joyful (a rare quality), and has become a social media star... Not only is she not afraid of being attacked by Republicans, she's eager to advocate policies like single-payer health care and dramatically higher taxes for the wealthy despite the fact that she knows Republicans will react in horror... Conservatives are appalled by her for much the same reason progressives love her..."

"In an interview, Ocasio-Cortez suggested...that income above $10m may need to be taxed up to 70%... Just to be clear: she said that when people earn $10m, the 10 millionth dollar and above should be taxed at a high rate. So unless you earn $10m, she’s not talking about “your” income."

"What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot."

"The mere thought of having a young, articulate, telegenic nonwhite woman serve is driving many on the right mad — and in their madness they’re inadvertently revealing their true selves. Some of the revelations are cultural: The hysteria over a video of AOC dancing in college says volumes, not about her, but about the hysterics. But in some ways the more important revelations are intellectual: The right’s denunciation of AOC’s “insane” policy ideas serves as a very good reminder of who is actually insane."

"she said on “Democracy Now!” that “the issues I ran on were very clear … improved and expanded Medicare for All; tuition-free public colleges and universities, as well as trade schools; a Green New Deal; justice for Puerto Rico; an unapologetic platform of criminal-justice reform and ending the war on drugs; and also speaking truth to power and speaking about money in politics.”"

"Ocasio-Cortez was seeking a “first-person idea of what was going on” in America, she told me when we spoke last fall. What she found was that “militarized corporations” were taking over parts of the country, unchecked by political powers."

"She got a call from the executive director of a group called Brand New Congress, a project recently launched by a group of progressive organizers, mostly fellow backers of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who were frustrated with the party’s entrenched establishment and wanted to train a slate of primary candidates. Would she have any interest in running for Congress? ...To the party’s leadership, Tuesday was a wake-up call; to the the party’s left flank, it was validation of the tactics and messaging they’ve been pushing for months. Start with Brand New Congress. Ocasio-Cortez is the first candidate backed by the organization to unseat an incumbent, which, after all, is the group’s stated aim. The organization, which has backed 26 House and Senate candidates in 2018, was an important incubator during the early phase of her campaign. She attended trainings with the group... and...was in constant contact with other candidates... sharing talking points about issues like Black Lives Matter or pension reform and exchanging best practices for door-knocking."

"We ask you, who are the real criminals? Who completely, through planned acts of genocide, destroyed the great Indian nation that once inhabited this continent? Who are the criminals? The criminal is the U.S. capitalist system."

"If ideas are "dangerous" then I am "dangerous" because I have ideas. I have ideas for a new system of government and society. Those ideas I have are called socialism. Socialism – a system where there will no longer exist a basis for the exploitation of man by man; a system of government where people – all people, without reservation – will be able to grow and develop into full human beings, where love will replace hate, where men, all men, can develop to their fullest potential."

"We have also been accused of being anarchists. Yes, we communists have been accused of being anarchists, because what else does the charge mean? It says that we were conspiring to commit "criminal anarchy" and the "jury," by its finding, in essence, did say we attempted to do this and, in fact, "we did it." Of course, anyone who has one ounce of political sophistication knows that a communist, who believes in the highest form of organized government – after the revolution – is not an anarchist and has been an opponent of this doctrine since its inception. But, as we have so graphically seen it demonstrated in this court, the truth was not allowed to be presented."

"Why are you weak? First of all, you spend billions of dollars on propaganda telling your people and the world what a great "democracy" you have. You tell them you have no political prisoners. You say that all political ideas have freedom of expression and on and on. If your form of democracy is so great, why are you afraid of political ideas that are so different? Why do you attempt to suppress them? If you are so sure of your form of democracy, why don't you open the flood gates and allow all ideas and ideologies to contend? That's a sign of strength. But you are afraid – therefore you are strategically weak!"

"Would a weak government, as a strong government, admit that it created the conditions for that type of outbreak to occur? A strong government would, but a government like this one, which, on the surface, appears to be strong, would do exactly what you are doing – ignore the conditions, buy off some of the "respectable" leaders, find a likely scapegoat and put the blame on him. I knew and everyone else in Harlem knew, that I was going to be the scapegoat so that the government could wipe its hands clean and duck all responsibility. Why was I the likely candidate? It's very simple. While the other so-called leaders were hiding and meeting and telling the people "things were fine," we were organizing the people to present their grievances to the city. We exposed the Police Department to be the terroristic organization that it is in Harlem. We were in the streets giving the leadership and we would not be bought off. And, of course, I am a communist!"

"This system cannot solve the problems that confront the Black people in this country nor can it solve the problems of the workers in general. You may have been successful so far in buying off some of the so-called leaders, but can you buy off the 16 million near-starving people that live in the mountains of Appalachia? No, you can't unless this system is changed!"

"The rule of dollar democracy by our financiers and industrialists at home has been translated into a regime of dollar diplomacy abroad and in our vast colonial possessions. American democracy now truly rests upon a monarchy of gold and an aristocracy of finance."

"Under the guise of protecting the weaker nations of South and Central America, the United States has assumed the undisputed hegemony over this territory. The Pan-American Union growing out of the Monroe Doctrine is completely dominated by American imperialists."

"Please use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites: One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the 'locus coeruleus,' which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation. Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin -- that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities. Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites. Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities -- something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards."

"Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact"

"a core part of my social experience on campus .. opportunity for students who were in search of that kind of support network and system on campus at that time"

"If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed, we will turn the page on hate and close the door on discrimination by enforcing our federal civil rights laws."

"Martin lavished praise on Kristen M. Clarke '97, the BSA president, who, he said, had courageously invited him "in the face of enormous pressure from the forces of reaction." It is young people like Kristen, Martin said, who are the hope and future of the African-American community."

"Our work is about supporting survivors by providing resources for healing and action. If in the course of that process a perpetrator is held accountable for their actions - so be it. But our goal is not to ‘take down’ individuals it’s to dismantle systems that give them cover."

"This movement is about making sure survivors have the resources to heal AFTER they’ve said #metoo, it’s about galvanizing a global community or survivors and advocates to do the work of interrupting sexual violence. It’s about protecting folks’ human dignity at all cost."

"There is inherent strength in agency. #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency."

"Sexual violence happens on a spectrum so accountability has to happen on a spectrum. I don’t think that every single case of sexual harassment has to result in someone being fired; the consequences should vary. But we need a shift in culture so that every single instance of sexual harassment is investigated and dealt with. That’s just basic common sense."

"We have to talk about consent really early on. I’m a big champion of sex education. Because I think that the only way we can have lasting changes is if we change the way that young people think about each other. We start teaching respect and boundaries very early, you know kindergarten, pre-kindergarten. We should be talking about respect and boundaries. We should be talking about what it means to ask permission. We should be talking about those things."

"It is important for us to know the history of Puerto Rican and Black women who fought for freedom of our peoples. We are not taught about them because even today people believe that women had no role in history. People still believe that women are only supposed to stay at home, cooking and sewing and raising children. These are the same things that were said to Sojourner Truth over a hundred years ago and they are still being said now. Women who speak out against injustice and fight for revolution are accused of acting like men, and we must understand that revolution is the job of men and women, brothers and sisters. We must learn from great women like Lolita Lebron, Carmen Perez, Antonia Martinez, Kathleen Cleaver and Ericka Huggins. This is what Point 10 of the YOUNG LORDS PARTY 13-Point Program and Platform means when it says "We want equality for women; machismo must be revolutionary and not oppressive.""

"Puerto Rico is being turned into the "showplace colony" of the united states. American corporations are everywhere, all over the island, using Puerto Rican people as cheap labor. Everything that cannot be sold in the states is dumped in Puerto Rico-plastic palm trees in people's homes instead of the real thing that grows outside, makeup that is not needed, wool maxi-skirts and boots to be worn in 80 degree weather. And the people are brain-washed into buying this shit. The radio blasts American music and advertisements-"radio San Juan-turns me on." We turned it off. You get better service if you speak English, the tourists act like they owned the island and the Borinquenos are just there to be servants and part of the scenery."

"all of our people are prostitutes for the American capitalists."

"The machismo is so strong that there are almost no sisters in the leadership of the independence movement. Where are the Lolita Lebrons, the [[Blanca Canalas]'s, the Viscals?"

"We should be proud of our Afro-Indio culture. We must fight against racism because it is a tool used to divide us."

"Many Black Puerto Ricans wind up voting for statehood because the only Black Puerto Rican leader was Jose Celso Barbosa (an American puppet), and he was for statehood."

"Puerto Ricans-WAKE UP"

"Our people are beautiful, Puerto Rican people have a revolutionary history, Puerto Rico is beautiful."

"We must follow the examples of Lolita Lebron, Pedro Albizu Campos, Julio Roldan, C.A.L. and MIRA. We must struggle against the american pigs and Puerto Rican vendepatrias."

"The role of women, initially, in a cultural context, was, on one hand, to be passive. That’s what we were programmed into believing. But when we started studying history—and Juan, as minister of education, made sure that we learned about radical women leaders in Puerto Rico. And so, for most of us, including those of us who had been to college, we had never heard of people like Mariana Bracetti. We had never heard of even Doña Fela, who was the mayor of San Juan for so many years. And we began to examine—remember, the women’s movement was also—the second wave—was also coming along. We laid out our newspaper at The Rat, which was taken over by women. So, we began to push back against the ideas of—in the program, it said revolutionary machismo. And we said, “That’s really ridiculous. Machismo is not revolutionary; it’s oppressive.” And the young men in the organization joined with us women, and we made that change."

"I think that the mainstream media has been focusing on the chat, you know, the exposure of the things said in a private chat. But on the island, people are demanding: One, they want the junta, the fiscal control board, out; two, they have been raising issues about violence against women; three, they’ve been talking about the fact that Rosselló brought an American woman in to revamp the educational system on the island, turn it into charter schools and shut down public education. And parents and teachers are protesting."

"One other thing I really want to bring up is that, in September, 900,000 people on the island are due to lose their medical coverage. And that’s going to be—we’re talking about 4,000 people who died in the hurricane. Imagine 900,000 people, where a lot of them are elderly and they’re not going to be able to get their insulin. Children won’t get their asthma medications. I mean, the number of deaths is going to be phenomenal. And I don’t want to see us go, “Oh, this is so terrible. Look at all the dead people in Puerto Rico. Let’s maybe do something now.” So people are raising these issues ahora, now, in Puerto Rico and also in the diaspora."

"So many things were changing in our world. We looked, and we searched in revolutionary literature. Maybe we found a few pieces, but there really wasn't much because the world had never really dealt with this. We did take as heroines of our struggle Lolita Lebrón and Blanca Canales because they had been in the Nationalist Party struggle in Puerto Rico. We looked to women like Angela Davis. There were two women in the Panther 21 case at the time, Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird, who had been arrested with the brothers. We were proud that women were going on posters. That was real important because this was new. The face of the civil rights movement had been male."

"if there is no unity within an organization as long as there is a disparity between men and women in the struggle, there will not be that ability to strive for change in the world."

"Many marriages broke up because we were trying to be different, and we didn't know how to maintain marital ties, or even know how to define what marriage was. We looked at it as chains, cadenas. You're not free! You're this new, liberated woman, but your husband keeps telling you what to do."

"Divorce is now par for the course in most families. Women are still trying to cope with how to run an organization, work a job, go to school, raise a family, and almost become superwomen. Maybe generations to come won't have to deal with these issues because we dealt with them then, and we're dealing with them now."

"I've walked through the streets in East Harlem, and people have said, "Dónde está los Young Lords?" Where did they go? People miss the Young Lords. They had been an integral part of that community in the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Philadelphia, New Haven, Hartford, and New Jersey."

"But the racism in the island, nobody wanted to deal with because I was told "no hay racismo en Puerto Rico." But that was not true. Color, caste, class, were major contradictions, even within left-wing political groups."

"That last migration in 1947 spawned a generation who had one foot in the United States, and maybe they had dreams of Puerto Rico, but the reality of their existence was here."

"The destruction to the Lords and other movements was a traumatic experience. I've learned similar to what Vietnam vets go though. They call it post-traumatic stress disorder; I call it post-traumatic revolutionary failure stress disorder-I have my own name for it. After the collapse of this revolution, many of us had to go on journeys of self-exploration. I had to bottom out. I got into drugs, alcohol, workaholism. The Young Lords were my family. It was my dream. I didn't know what to put there. I didn't know how to deal with it. And I did it in isolation. Many of us did it in isolation. It's only now, years later that I can look at it more comfortably and understand what happened. I did become very disillusioned and didn't want to have anything to do with organizing anything for a period of time. But that healed. It's taken twenty years. The wounds are not there anymore-as open wounds. And the scabs are no longer there. There is some scar tissue, but it's not uncomfortable so I can look at things from a different perspective. And I keep returning to doing the kinds of things that I feel are necessary for social change. We need another Young Lords."

"We are fighting against an enemy, the Yankee, and the Puerto Rican lombrices. The one major thing that holds us back in our fight to liberate Puerto Rico and all oppressed people is a lack of unity."

"Capitalism is a system that forces us to climb over our brothers and sisters' back to get to the top. It is like a race, in which the prize is survival....We fight against each other to live, and we are divided into groups that fight against each other. These groups are formed out of artificial division of race and sex, and social groupings....Many of these divisions that exist are a result of colonization...As a result of the oppression suffered for generations and generations, first under Spain and then under the amerikkkans, we all develop a "colonized mentality""

"We are afraid to lead, because we are taught to be followers. We have been told that we are docile so long, that we have forgotten that we have always been fighters.... We can only unchain our minds from this colonized mentality if we learn our true history, understand our culture, and work toward unity."

"Having slaves for ancestors is not something to be ashamed of; one should be proud to know that one's ancestors were strong enough to live through the horrors of slavery, strong because of the rich and beautiful history of Africa. We are taught that Africans were savages, and this makes us non-consciously ashamed of our past."

"Because of the Black Power movement inside of the united states, American Blacks are now able to hold their heads up high and be proud of their past. It is necessary that we study Puerto Rican history, much of which is African history, so that we can move on ridding ourselves of the barriers that exist between Afro-boricua and jibaro."

"We should not be afraid to criticize ourselves about racism. We are all racists, not because we want to be, but because we are taught to be that way, to keep us divided, because it benefits the capitalist system. And this applies to racism toward Asians, other Brown people, and toward white people. White people are not all the oppressor-capitalists are. We will never have socialism until we are free of these chains on our mind."

"the Afro-Caribbean origins of Puerto Ricans make them people who have had to continually negotiate the black-white racial divide, both in the United States and in Puerto Rico. In the organization's analysis of race, the Young Lords explored the differences between Afro-Boricuas (Puerto Rican blacks) and Jibros (light-skinned Creoles). Capturing this distinction between light-and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans, Pablo Guzmán claimed, "before they called me a spic, they called me a nigger." The resignation of Young Lords leader Denise Oliver and her subsequent membership in the Black Panther Party is further testimony to the close and interconnected political and racial relationship between Puerto Rican and African American leftists during this period."

"Thinking that only institutions oppress women as opposed to other people. This implies that you have not identified your enemy, for institutions are only a tool of the oppressor. When the oppressor is stopped he can no longer maintain his tools and they are rendered useless. Present institutions and our feelings about them should be analyzed in order to understand what it is we want or don't want to use in the new society."

"Education does not bring on revolutions; but consciousness of our own oppression and struggle might. Unfortunately formal education and political consciousness do not usually coincide. Even formal education in Marxism-Leninism tends to make people think that they know more than they really know. When we think of what it is that politicizes people it is not so much books or ideas but experience."

"The cultural-political perspectives of Jewish feminists interacted with the ideas of many other pioneering women's liberationists in the city, Jewish and non-Jewish, including Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, Irene Peslikis, Peggy Dobbins, Anne Koedt, Pat Mainardi, Robin Morgan, Ann Snitow, and Vivian Gornick. Acting within a communal context, innovative theory and practice emerged from group interaction."

"Redstockings staged a public hearing at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where a dozen women told a crowd of several hundred about their own abortions. The effect was electric, sending shock waves through the community and the nation and helping to lead a groundswell of action against illegal abortion, one that culminated a few years later in Roe v. Wade. This first speak-out, organized by Shulamith Firestone, Irene Peslikis, and others, inspired similar events elsewhere, including in France, where a number of prominent women, including Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Willis's heroine as well as Firestone's), risked imprisonment by publicly declaring, "I have had an abortion.""

"Black Americans are residents of a settler colony, not truly citizens of the United States. Despite a constitution laden with European Enlightenment values and a document of independence declaring certain inalienable rights, Black existence was legally that of private property until postbellum emancipation. The Black American condition today is an evolved condition directly connected to this history of slavery, and that will continue to be the case as long as the United States remains as an ongoing settler project. Nothing short of a complete dismantling of the American state as it presently exists can or will disrupt this."

"I think one of the most important parts about mutual aid has to do with changing the social relationships that we have amongst each other, in order to be able to fight beyond this current moment, beyond the current crisis, beyond the current form of a disaster that we’re trying to overcome. And so, one of the beautiful aspects is that you really don’t know where the connections are going to take you. You’re going to make and build new relationships that will kind of lead to new projects and will lead to new understandings, that will shape the potential future of, you know, your community and beyond."

"Poetry helps me to imagine freedom."

"How do we mourn? How can we grieve? I think poetry opens a door. Poetry helps us to resist."

"Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation."

"Often, the home is a practice ground often for the violence that then becomes public violence. We really do take—you know, tend to minimize private violence and focus on the spectacular examples of public violence. But if we don’t address that private violence, then we are going to continue to see public violence in the ways that we have."

"I think part of what we have to talk about is the fact that one of the main tricks, I think, of white supremacy is that it invisiblizes both kind of structures of violence and tries to focus mostly on individual forms of violence, right? So that when we see a situation where, for the most part, the people who are doing these mass killings are mostly young white men, the story gets told that that is a form of violence that’s kind of an acceptable, normal form of violence. When people of color and others commit forms of violence, we are told and taught to see that as somehow outside of the norm of general kinds of violence, and we tend to catastrophize that. And then that also leads to certain kinds of policy responses that are intended to actually continue to oppress the groups that are very much already targeted and oppressed. So, I think that that is a big aspect of this that we have to look at, that you can’t look at these mass shootings without understanding also the ways in which violence is the glue that holds forms of oppression in place. And one of those forms of oppression is white supremacist kinds of forms of violence and oppression."

"I think we’re going to have to be much more creative in the way that we address issues. I tend to be skeptical of gun control, in general. I see it often as a way to criminalize communities of color further."

"I have been thinking a lot about #MeToo and thinking, What if we look at it as something that is not done to "bad people?" What if it is actually a way to understand the ways that various forms of violence actually shape our lives? If we could see it as a way to understand how deeply enmeshed we are in the very systems that we're organizing to transform, then I feel like it's a movement that will allow us to move a step toward transformation and more justice."

"The fact that sexual violence is so incredibly pervasive should tell us that it's not a story of individual monsters. We have got to think about this in a more complex way if we're really going to uproot forms of sexual violence."

"Remember, the systems live within us (referring to the words of Morgan Bassichis). The punishment mindset is very hard to get out of. And it's normal and healthy often to want vengeance against people for causing you great harm. That's not going to get addressed in an accountability process. If you are the one who is rushing after that and that's really what you're seeking, an accountability process really would not help. You're always going to be feeling as though it's "not working" because it's not doing the thing that you really would like."

"Failure and mistakes are part of a process."

"Going into processes, if you go into it with an idea that the person you're working with is a fragile China doll who is going to crack under any pressure, you can't make a mistake-well, then you're already set up for failure, in the sense of potential catastrophic hurt. Start off with the notion that our process allows for survivors to reclaim agency. That's what you're working toward. The binary of success/failure, get rid of that. That's important, number one."

"With punishment at the center of everything we haven't been able to really address the other stuff that needs to happen. Because people fucking need to-they need to take accountability when they harm people."

"Some people may ask, "Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger?" Abolition does not center that question. Instead, abolition challenges us to ask "Why do we have no other well-resourced options?" and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm. Repeated attempts to improve the sole option offered by the state, despite how consistently corrupt and injurious it has proven itself, will neither reduce nor address the harm that actually required the call. We need more and effective options for the greatest number of people."

"Let's begin our abolitionist journey not with the question "What do we have now, and how can we make it better?" Instead, let's ask, "What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?" If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us."

"I was struck again by the importance of language and of words that need to be spoken. Our best teachers, including Audre Lorde among others, have imparted this truth. In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. It's not that I don't already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence. These words should be taken for granted. They are not. I've revised my previous belief that the words should remain unspoken. "Who are they trying to convince?" I'd previously confided to a friend. It turns out that I owe a debt of gratitude to Opal, Patrisse, and Alicia for reminding me of the power of language and the spoken word."

"I have so many touchstones. I believe in touchstones, people you go back to in particular moments when you need something. I turn to Baldwin a lot. I read him when I'm feeling a sense of despair over the world that I'm in. I find a sentence that he wrote and it's like, "Ooh, yes." I think about so many of the Black communist and socialist women of the first part of the century. If they could go through what they went through, if Marvel Cooke could survive the Red Scare and being fired by the Amsterdam News-she was the first woman working there ever-if she can endure that in the 1930s, what am I doing? You know what I mean? Now I have so much more at my disposal. I'm so much less oppressed. I love Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I love reading her journal where she's lamenting that she can't stop spending money, like, "Why did I buy that scarf? My God. Why am I spending this money?" And it's beautiful, because it shows you this woman who fearlessly went to the South by herself to literally take down people's testimony after a lynching, just sitting around saying, "Why can't I fucking stop shopping? Why did I buy this super expensive scarf that I cannot afford?" It makes me so happy to go back to that and read that passage and be like, "Yes, Ida!"...Angela Davis is a huge touchstone for me. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore is a touchstone for me. Beth Richie is a touchstone for me. A lot of Black feminist women who I've been able to be in space with in real life. Some who've given me a way of being in the world."

"June Jordan, who has been a touchstone of mine, really, since I first read her work in college, which was many, many years ago. So I really can't believe that I'm here today, and I'm really grateful to be here with all of you to celebrate her legacy and her life. June Jordan loved Black people, and so do I. She was an educator, and so am I. She was an activist; so am I. She was an internationalist, and so am I. She was a brilliant writer, and I am not-at all...She insisted that by organizing, we have the power to overcome oppression. I too believe this to be true."

"I think, really, the reason why the book has been resonating is because of the uprisings and the struggle in the streets, the fact that so many people around the country recognize the complete and utter failures and limits of so-called reform to actually do what people want, which is to have some little modicum of justice. So, I think people are impatient with incrementalism and are impatient with solutions that don’t actually address the root causes of violence. And part of that is the fact that, you know, policing is inherently violent and that the starting point has to be to actually reduce people’s contact with the police altogether. And I always tell people, if you care about the violence of policing, then you should want as little policing as possible in any form."

"I always tell people that when we talk about prison-industrial complex abolition, we’re talking about a dual project. We’re talking about, on the one hand, a project that is about dismantling death-making institutions, like policing and prisons and surveillance, and creating life-affirming ones, putting resources and investing in the things we know do keep people safe — housing, healthcare, schooling, all kinds of other things, you know, living wages. You just talked with Reverend Barber earlier. Those types of investments are what really actually keep people safe. So, that’s what PIC abolition is really about at its core."

"I also keep thinking about the cruel irony of naming a bill after — a police reform, supposedly, bill, after someone who was killed by the police, and then to include a whole set of so-called procedural reforms that would not have prevented that person’s death. So, you know, this particular offering that they’re making, supposedly, in Congress wouldn’t have kept George Floyd alive. And I think that’s just cruel irony."

"That’s a chant that has been ringing out in the streets ever since 2014 in Ferguson and in New York and all around the country. I’ve seen and heard, when I was in the streets with young people at protests, young people in Chicago screaming that chant."

"one of my teachers around this is a writer and a thinker named Mariame Kaba, and she’s an exquisite human being, exquisite thinker. And one of the things that she often reminds me of — because I think what would be so comforting to us is if we could be like, We’re going to end the prison system and automatically move to a very well-organized, centralized system where instead of everyone going to prison, you just go straight to a mediator and it’s all handled. And she’s like, It won’t be a huge, overarching, centralized system. Transformative justice will be a lot of us learning the skills to hold conflict within our communities, within our families, within our schools and institutions. We’re learning, ourselves, to hold it in different ways."

"Mariame Kaba has given incredible talks about this, that we've had 250 years of this well-funded prison system experiment. And it hasn't stopped rape. It hasn't stopped robberies. It hasn't stopped drugs. It hasn't stopped anything at all. All of those things that we think of as harm, they continue without the responses they need...One of the other things that Mariame points out—what would it look like if the experiment of transformative justice was as well funded as the experiment of prison? We have no idea what things could look like at scale because we've never actually had the resources to even experiment at any kind of scale. We’ve had to argue over every penny."

"Change requires collaboration and coalition, even (especially) uncomfortable coalition. Mariame Kaba, a longtime prison abolitionist who has done as much as anyone to imagine what it would take to live in a world that does not equate safety with police and cages, puts the lesson succinctly, one passed on to her by her father: "Everything worthwhile is done with other people.""

"why has Mariame written so much if she detests writing? And when it's often but not always done solo? In addition to writing that advances organizations and writing to support campaigns, Mariame is practicing what she preaches to fellow organizers: document your work and write your self into the record. Mariame encourages organizers to do so, despite any attention given to them by journalists, pundits, and academics, as many from the outside might not get it right. In doing so, Mariame has joined a publishing history of Black women organizers and activists who wrote themselves into the archives, including Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett."

"In now famous words, prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba tells us that "hope is a discipline.""

"some of the leading abolitionists in the United States and around the world today are people like Mariame Kaba and Andrea Smith and Kelly Gillespie and others, who came out of work against domestic violence — i.e. it was in doing work to try to fight against violence and harm, that they realized abolition was the only way to resolve the problems that were not being resolved by having better, faster, more swift and sure punishment when somebody harmed somebody else."

"I spend every morning at my desk working on a book about the Trusts but my progress seems lamentably slow. However, it "do move." The worst of it is the work is really so distasteful. It keeps me poking about and scavengering in piles of filthy human greed and cruelty almost too nauseous to handle. Nothing but the sternest sense of duty and the conviction that men must understand the vices of our present system before they will be able to rise to a better, drives me back to my desk every day."

"The methods by which the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Fields, Rockefellers, Mackays, Floods, O'Briens, and the coal and iron and salt Pashas are heaping up enormous fortunes are methods, not of creation of wealth, but of the redistribution of the wealth of the masses into the pockets of monopolists."

"The bottom truth is that Governor Altgeld is of that type whose brains and character alike do not make it possible for their personal success to suffocate their love of justice. He is a man whom the trusts, corporations, and concentrated millionairism of the country have found it impossible to bend, break, or seduce. If such men as Altgeld the Democrat and Pingree the Republican survive, monopoly will perish and monopoly by a sure instinct of self-preservation has set itself to destroy them by ridicule, slander, and by every means of financial and political assault. One of the most regrettable features of public opinion in this campaign is that so many of the American people have allowed themselves to be played upon by these sinister interests who are catering to every prejudice and using every ingenuity of misrepresentation to destroy public confidence in the few public men who are standing like giants on guard for the public."

"Nature is rich; but everywhere man, the heir of nature, is poor."

"Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty."

"If our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know."

"The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums, and every day it runs the labor of hundreds of men is withdrawn from the production of helpful things for humanity."

"It illustrates what Ruskin calls the "morbid" character of modern business that the history of its most brilliant episodes must be studied in the vestibules of the penitentiary."

"Monopoly is business at the end of its journey."

"We have chartered the self-interest of the individual as the rightful sovereign of conduct; we have taught that the scramble for profit is the best method of administering the riches of earth and the exchange of services. Only those can attack this system who attack its central principle, that strength gives the strong in the market the right to destroy his neighbor. Only as we have denied that right to the strong elsewhere have we made ourselves as civilized as we are."

"Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems, becoming artificial, technical, corrupt; and, as always happens in human institutions, after noon, power is stealing from the many to the few."

"Believing wealth to be good, the people believed the wealthy to be good. But, again in history, power has intoxicated and hardened its possessors, and pharaohs are bred in counting-rooms as they were in palaces."

"Probably millions of men read or heard Mr. Lloyd's ideas without being aware of the real authorship. But I judge that with this condition he was well content. No man ever entered such a fight with a smaller share of personal vanity to gratify. He desired that his countrymen should be informed of existing conditions, but not that he himself should gain fame or rewards."

"Yes, we were dreamers when we advocated legislation for Unemployment Insurance, for Social Security, for minimum wages. They laughed at our crazy ideas. Although we have not reached perfection, many of our ‘wild dreams' have now become realities of everyday life."

"Once after he was re-elected, he said: I have accepted the presidency again because I am foreign-born, and I am proud of the great service we have performed for America. When we banished the sweatshops, when we reduced the hours of work, when we increased wages, when we provided health centers, when we established Unity House, when we participated in community life, when we eliminated worry, torture, hunger and starvation, we performed a service for the future of America."

"He summed up his view on strikes this way: First you get a whip, and then when everyone knows you have it, you put it in the refrigerator."

"I think that my years in Lodz and the prison days that followed helped me a lot. Even as a child I saw what despotism and dictatorship meant."

"When he announced his retirement on March 16, 1966, he told fellow union officers, I didn't have a life, I had a union life. He went on: You know my nature. If I'm president I can't only be president from morning till night. It has to be from morning until the next morning."

"D.D. reviewed the struggles of the ILGWU through difficult years, as it surmounted great obstacles and fought enemies outside and inside. Sentence by sentence, he built up a compelling picture of the tremendous significance of our organization's achievements. One got a new conception of the International, of the boundless energy, stubborn devotion to an ideal, and stamina it had taken to rebuild the organization out of the wreckage left by the dual union after the disastrous 26-weeks' strike in New York in 1926. That had been our first defeat, he pointed out; it left the ILGWU saddled with a debt exceeding $2,000,000, a shameful monument to the reckless spending orgy which characterized the "left wing" administration then in power. The International had ridden out the storm and cleared the bulk of its obligations, and its 35th anniversary was being celebrated with the greatest convention it had ever held. The ILGWU membership had dropped from 110,000 in 1920, to 40,000 in January 1, 1933. Now height of nearly 200,000. At this 22nd biennial it had climbed to gathering were 369 delegates, 143 locals, and 13 joint boards, located in 73 cities in 16 states and Canada. Our president dwelt on how the union had pioneered in collective bargaining, and in labor education, enlisted the aid of public-spirited citizens and government officials in the fight to eliminate sweatshops, protected the health of the workers, participated in community activities, given aid to charitable institutions, and helped other labor organizations both in this country and abroad in their battles to uphold human rights. The International had reduced working hours in our industry to 35, won high minimum wage scales, and established the right of workers to their jobs, so they could not be discharged without review by a proper impartial tribunal. Dubinsky touched upon the 1930 industrial upheaval, when tens of thousands of our workers lost their jobs, employers forced work conditions down to the lowest possible level, and the sweatshop in its worst forms reappeared. In the three years following, garment makers were close to starvation. When the National Industrial Recovery Act came into being as a part of the New Deal, our workers benefited greatly, Dubinsky recalled, "largely because of the militancy of our union and its readiness not only to threaten to strike, but actually to resort to strikes when the occasion called for it""

"Dubinsky regarded as a mistake the efforts of the Darrow Commission to maintain the small business man's existence at all costs. "From the first day of the depression," he declared, "it was clear that the little man could survive only at the expense of labor. Unwilling to admit that economic forces were working against him, and that he would shortly become a part of the working class himself or starve, the small business man continued a haphazard existence by slashing wages here, chiseling there, lengthening hours. "The little business man ought to realize that as a capitalist he cuts a sorry figure, and that no legislation or other force can turn the clock back for him. In any event, labor does not propose to be exploited by him. We refuse to return to the sweatshop or permit the degradation of our workers to justify or extend the existence of the small business man.""

"Applause rocked the big auditorium as our president finished with these words: "It was an outcry of injustice against miserable conditions that finally prompted the Government to begin thinking and talking and considering social legislation. But it will be the power of organized labor that will make it not only the subject for discussion, but a matter of law, a matter of practice, a matter of relief to the oppressed..."We are serving humanity, fighting for freedom...Our cause is just and our purpose is noble. Our defeats are only temporary setbacks. We are bound to win...United as never before, shoulder to shoulder, let us go marching on to our future battles and more glorious victories.""

"Gavel in one hand and cigar in the other, he conducted the convention sessions masterfully. Much has been said and written, both commendatory and critical, about the president of our International, since that convention. Some observers have compared him to the young David slaying the giant Goliath; others consider him almost a demigod whose wisdom cannot even be questioned. Reactionaries classify him among the hated New Dealers, a connotation damning him in the eyes of profiteers, Tammany politicians, and gangsters."

"I came to know Dubinsky in the following years as a man of tremendous vitality, ready to undertake almost any big task, provided he was sure the huge membership of the International was behind him. An individual of strong feelings, sensitive and impulsive, he could alternately be ruthless or break out in tears of humility."

"I wanted everything — very earnestly and totally — I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother. ... So my feeling was, 'Well' — as I had many times had the feeling — 'Well, nobody's done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I'm doing, I'm going to risk it."

"I decided I didn't want to live with a man. My family experience of growing up made me think that living with men wasn't a nice idea. I had lots of lovers, and I asked people if they wanted to father a kid, and everybody thought I was insane, and finally I didn't ask — I just got pregnant and had Jeanne."

"I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other"

"get up, put on your shoes, get started, someone will finish"

"Left to themselves people grow their hair. Left to themselves they take off their shoes. Left to themselves they make love sleep easily share blankets, dope & children they are not lazy or afraid they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one another."

"avoid the folk who find Bonnie and Clyde too violent"

"but don’t get uptight : the guns will not win this one, they are an incidental part of the action which we better damn well be good at, what will win is mantras, the sustenance we give each other, the energy we plug into"

"NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down."

"Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes [...] She broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity."

"For six decades, her writing confronted the traditional stereotypes of the female body, how it should look, weigh, and be desired. She was, to my eye, the real sexual liberator of the sixties — a woman who wrote dangerously, lived wildly, and loved daringly, right up to her very last breath. [...] Diane di Prima knew firsthand what it was like to make a seat for herself at tables that had no space for women like her — women who challenged the system, and who thrived in the act. She was always in coalition with such women, and you can hear echoes of her work in the "fight the patriarchy" slogans of modern feminism. She ... was raised by the women in her mother’s family to understand that men are just "a luxury," not a necessity for women's survival. To survive in this world as a woman, she learned, was to live in a state of insurgency, and to make peace with that fact. ... She saw herself as a weapon to be deployed — no, detonated — against her oppressors. She wrote about the equality of the sexes. She wrote about women as wolves, women as predators, as hunters, as villains. She wrote about fat women, queer women, androgynous women, disobedient women, women as Gods, as birds, as the wind."

"We had a birthday party for her when she turned 80 and there were, you know, punk rockers and, you know, trans people and old hippies and beatniks and little teenagers."

"Nothing I have experienced prepared me for the very public and relentless implosion of my father’s life,"