Socialists from the United States

1667 quotes found

"Schools across the country celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Day today... Many schools show his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, a speech given before hundreds of thousands... Dr. King's commitment provides a wonderful example for all of us, but particularly for the young. By the wisdom of his teaching, the justice of his cause, the intensity of his commitment, he helped transform America. Today, Dr. King's example is more important than ever. Inequality has reached new extremes. We have a president that purposefully rouses racial and ethnic fears and divisions. Politics has become bitter, partisan, and increasingly marked by extreme and often hateful rhetoric. We are spending more and more on the Pentagon—already the largest military budget by far in the world—and cutting back on programs for the vulnerable, everything from food stamps, to Medicaid, to public housing and aid for poor schools and students. We end up with guided missiles and misguided young people—a tragic waste. Today, a new Poor People’s Campaign is building, organizing lines of race, region, and religion. It has been marching on state legislatures and now is increasing pressure on Washington. It is not about right or left, but about right and wrong. Dr. King called on us to express the better angels of our souls. Now, as we celebrate his life, we would do well to put his lessons into practice."

- Jesse Jackson

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"Jackson was the first presidential candidate, 1988, to plead and repeat the plight of 650,000 American farmers losing their farms within the eight years of Reagan's reign. He was the first to identify drugs as the number one menace to domestic security. He was the first and only American contender for the U.S. presidency to demand that South Africa be designated a terrorist state and treated accordingly. He was the first and only candidate to call the name of the Palestinian people; he said the words the Palestinians, and he called for self-determination, and statehood, for these beleaguered, taboo human beings. Jesse Jackson was the first and only candidate for the Democratic nomination to assert that there must be a single standard for the measurement, and protection, of human rights throughout the world: No country-not France nor Israel nor Nigeria nor South Korea nor Iran nor South Africa should be exempted from the requirements of that single standard. He was the first and only presidential contender to propose a world view profoundly alternative to the traditions of imperialist perspective. Jackson proposed that the majority of human life / the peoples of the Third World be accorded proportionate political respect, economic aid, and inventive consideration as potential social and economic partners. No longer should the Third World serve as a playpen for greedy, killer interventionist maneuvers by aging cold warriors. And he was the first and the only Republican or Democratic candidate to propose an international minimum wage."

- Jesse Jackson

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"Up against Dukakis and the Democratic party, Jackson set the agenda for the platform debate. And, while many of the demands of his program met with resolute derision, he did succeed in gaining the Democratic party's designation of South Africa as a terrorist state, and he did push Dukakis into a posture of unequivocal opposition to aid to the contras, unequivocal support for child care, and, alas, equivocal support for universal health insurance. He did embarrass the Democrats into public refusal to establish a "no first strike" nuclear policy, and he did force the Democratic Party to reduce by 50 percent the number of "Super-delegates" who will be anointed for the next presidential election campaign. He did, irreversibly, tutor American consciousness about the continuing anti-democratic political structures that block our decisive exercise of the vote, and he did, again, embarrass Dukakis into publicly waffling on Dukakis's own promise to fund a nationwide voter registration drive and to vastly simplify the whole voting registration process. He did lead the reentry of concepts of right and wrong back into the center of political deliberations. He did meet with Israel's ambassador to the United States, August 8, 1988, and Israel's ambassador to the United States did meet, August 8, 1988, for more than two hours, with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and, you know, Jesse just really came really, really close to opening up the White House to the world's best barbecue and general/populist celebration of all time. And as for those millions and millions of us who chose Jesse Jackson as our candidate, we would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to notice how much we scared the currently powerful: literally, we scared them almost to death!"

- Jesse Jackson

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"I believe in the Motherhood of God. I believe in the Blessed Trinity of Father, Mother and Child. I believe that God is here, and that we are as near Him now as ever we shall be. I do not believe He started this world a-going and went away and left it to run by itself. I believe in the sacredness of the human body, this transient dwelling place of a living soul, And so I deem it the duty of every man and every woman to keep his or her body beautiful through right thinking and right living. I believe that the love of man for woman, and the love of woman for man is holy; And that this love in all its promptings is as much an emanation of the Divine Spirit as man's love for God, or the most daring hazards of the human mind. I believe in salvation through economic, social, and spiritual freedom. I believe John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Leo Tolstoy to be Prophets of God, who should rank in mental reach and spiritual insight with Elijah, Hosea, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. I believe that men are inspired to-day as much as ever men were. I believe we are now living in Eternity as much as ever we shall. I believe that the best way to prepare for a Future Life is to be kind, live one day at a time, and do the work you can do best, doing it as well as you can. I believe we should remember the Week-day, to keep it holy. I believe there is no devil but fear. I believe that no one can harm you but yourself. I believe in my own divinity — and yours. I believe that we are all sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. I believe the only way we can reach the Kingdom of Heaven is to have the Kingdom of Heaven in our hearts. I believe in every man minding his own business. I believe in sunshine, fresh air, friendship, calm sleep, beautiful thoughts. I believe in the paradox of success through failure. I believe in the purifying process of sorrow, and I believe that death is a manifestation of life. I believe the Universe is planned for good. I believe it is possible that I shall make other creeds, and change this one, or add to it, from time to time, as new light may come to me."

- Elbert Hubbard

0 likesBusinesspeople from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesAnarchists from the United StatesSocial anarchists
"No man who believes in force and violence is an Anarchist. The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms. Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of Anarchy. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South. The Socialist believes in working for the good of all, while Anarchy is pure Individualism. I believe in every man working for the good of self; and in working for the good of self, he works for the good of all. To think, to see, to feel, to know; to deal justly; to bear all patiently; to act quietly; to speak cheerfully; to moderate one's voice — these things will bring you the highest good. They will bring you the love of the best, and the esteem of that Sacred Few, whose good opinion alone is worth cultivating. And further than this, it is the best way you can serve Society — live your life. The wise way to benefit humanity is to attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to look after theirs. If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it. Would you make men better — set them an example. The millenium will never come until governments cease from governing, and the meddler is at rest. Politicians are men who volunteer the task of governing us, for a consideration. The political boss is intent on living off your labor. A man may seek an office in order to do away with the rascal who now occupies it, but for the most part office-seekers are rank rogues. Shakespeare used the word politician five times, and each time it is synonymous with knave. That is to say, a politician is one who sacrifices truth and honor for policy. The highest motive of his life is expediency — policy. In King Lear it is the "scurvy politician," who through tattered clothes beholds small vices, while robes and furred gowns, for him, covers all."

- Elbert Hubbard

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"There have always existed three ways of keeping the people loving and loyal. One is to leave them alone, to trust them and not to interfere. This plan, however, has very seldom been practised, because the politicians regard the public as a cow to be milked, and something must be done to make it stand quiet. So they try Plan Number Two, which consists in hypnotizing the public by means of shows, festivals, parades, prizes and many paid speeches, sermons and editorials, wherein and whereby the public is told how much is being done for it, and how fortunate it is in being protected and wisely cared for by its divinely appointed guardians. Then the band strikes up, the flags are waved, three passes are made, one to the right and two to the left; and we, being completely under the hypnosis, hurrah ourselves hoarse. Plan Number Three is a very ancient one and is always held back to be used in case Number Two fails. It is for the benefit of the people who do not pass readily under hypnotic control. If there are too many of these, they have been known to pluck up courage and answer back to the speeches, sermons and editorials. Sometimes they refuse to hurrah when the bass-drum plays, in which case they have occasionally been arrested for contumacy and contravention by stocky men, in wide-awake hats, who lead the strenuous life. This Plan Number Three provides for an armed force that shall overawe, if necessary, all who are not hypnotized. The army is used for two purposes — to coerce disturbers at home, and to get up a war at a distance, and thus distract attention from the troubles near at hand. Napoleon used to say that the only sure cure for internal dissension was a foreign war: this would draw the disturbers away, on the plea of patriotism, so they would win enough outside loot to satisfy them, or else they would all get killed, it really didn't matter much; and as for loot, if it was taken from foreigners, there was no sin. A careful analyst might here say that Plan Number Three is only a variation of Plan Number Two — the end being gained by hypnotic effects in either event, for the army is conscripted from the people to use against the people, just as you turn steam from a boiler into the fire-box to increase the draft. ..."

- Elbert Hubbard

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"Surely, the time has come for the intellectuals, the liberals, and the radicals of the world to speak out about this new slavery, to call it clearly and bluntly what it is. For it can no longer be doubted that in this dictatorship of the politicians is to be found every abuse which liberals and radicals have denounced in their own society for generations. . . . the Soviet has allowed it people to starve by the thousands. . . . It has choked all competition, and made itself a monopoly of monopolies; it has restored serfdom, conscription of labor, and indentured servitude among a people that has recently liberated itself by revolution and civil war, from these feudal chains; . . . it has kept wages low and labor intense, it has made democracy in the factory only a sham; it has herded and regimented its people like cattle. It has pitilessly industrialized its women under the pretense of emancipating them; it has crowded the population into dingy quarters, and offered every discouragement to the creation of homes. . . . . It is stifled the growth of democracy, and has centralized power into dictatorship of fanatics and machines; it has waged a class war against the peasants, tradesmen, and mental workers; . . . there is no opportunity for the expression of the public will; . . . it has oppressed with unsurpassed barbarity men and women guilty of no other crime than the prosperity attendant upon enterprise, industry, intelligence, and thrift; it has refused to the rights of habeas corpus, of trial by jury, of equality before the law; it has sent it secret police into millions of homes; . . . it has terrorized the public with marching armies, secret police, merciless penalties, and a million spies. It has deported or shot hundreds of thousands of men and women solely for political heresy and non-conformance. It has subjected to censorship every drama and every book, even every opera; it has prostituted the press, the radio and the stage . . . It has suppressed all freedom of speech or assembly, and in effect has raised a thousand obstacles against the freedom of worship and belief. . . Slavery, barbarism and desolation—these fundamentally, despite a thousand minor virtues, is what Russia is today."

- Will Durant

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"History is a process of rebarbarization. A people made vigorous by arduous physical conditions of life, and driven by the increasing exigencies of survival, leaves its native habitat, moves down upon a less vigorous people, conquers, displaces, or absorbs it. Habits of resolution and activity developed in a less merciful environment now rapidly produce an economic surplus; and part of the resources so accumulated serve as capital in a campaign of imperialist conquest. The growing surplus generates a leisure class, scornful of physical activity and adept in the arts of luxury. Leisure begets speculation; speculation dissolves dogma and corrodes custom, develops sensitivity of perception and destroys decision of action. Thought, adventuring in a labyrinth of analysis, discovers behind society the individual; divested of its normal social function it turns inward and discovers the self. The sense of common interest, of commonwealth, wanes; there are no citizens now, there are only individuals. From afar another people, struggling against the forces of an obdurate environment, sees here the cleared forests, the liberating roads, the harvest of plenty, the luxury of leisure. It dreams, aspires, dares, unites, invades. The rest is as before. Rebarbarization is rejuvenation. The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization."

- Will Durant

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"The rise of philosophy, then, often heralds the decay of a civilization. Speculation begins with nature and begets naturalism; it passes to man—first as a psychological mystery and then as a member of society—and begets individualism. Philosophers do not always desire these results; but they achieve them. They feel themselves the unwilling enemies of the state: they think of men in terms of personality while the state thinks of men in terms of social mechanism. Some philosophers would gladly hold their peace, but there is that in them which will out; and when philosophers speak, gods and dynasties fall. Most states have had their roots in heaven, and have paid the penalty for it: the twilight of the gods is the afternoon of states. Every civilization comes at last to the point where the individual, made by speculation conscious of himself as an end per se, demands of the state, as the price of its continuance, that it shall henceforth enhance rather than exploit his capacities. Philosophers sympathize with this demand, the state almost always rejects it: therefore civilizations come and civilizations go. The history of philosophy is essentially an account of the efforts great men have made to avert social disintegration by building up natural moral sanctions to take the place of the supernatural sanctions which they themselves have destroyed. To find—without resorting to celestial machinery—some way of winning for their people social coherence and permanence without sacrificing plasticity and individual uniqueness to regimentation,—that has been the task of philosophers, that is the task of philosophers."

- Will Durant

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"Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens — this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing."

- Will Durant

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"But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. So, okay, there was no such thing as cultural polyploidy. There was just a determinate historical situation, the consequence of all that had come before—the decisions made, the results spreading out over the planet in complete disarray, evolving, or one should say developing, without a plan. Planless. In that regard there was a similarity between history and evolution, both of them being matters of contingency and accident, as well as patterns of development. But the differences, particularly in time scales, were so gross as to make that similarity nothing more than analogy again. No, better to concentrate on homologies, those structural similarities that indicated actual physical relationships, that really explained something. This of course took one back into science."

- Kim Stanley Robinson

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"They who have been reading the capitalist newspapers realize what a capacity they have for lying. We have been reading them lately. They know all about the Socialist Party—the Socialist movement, except what is true. Only the other day they took an article that I had written—and most of you have read it—most of you members of the party, at least—and they made it appear that I had undergone a marvelous transformation. I had suddenly become changed—had in fact come to my senses; I had ceased to be a wicked Socialist, and had become a respectable Socialist, a patriotic Socialist—as if I had ever been anything else. What was the purpose of this deliberate misrepresentation? It is so self-evident that it suggests itself. The purpose was to sow the seeds of dissension in our ranks; to have it appear that we were divided among ourselves; that we were pitted against each other, to our mutual undoing. But Socialists were not born yesterday. They know how to read capitalist newspapers; and to believe exactly the opposite of what they read. Why should a Socialist be discouraged on the eve of the greatest triumph in all the history of the Socialist movement? It is true that these are anxious, trying days for us all — testing days for the women and men who are upholding the banner of labor in the struggle of the working class of all the world against the exploiters of all the world; a time in which the weak and cowardly will falter and fail and desert. They lack the fiber to endure the revolutionary test; they fall away; they disappear as if they had never been. On the other hand, they who are animated by the unconquerable spirit of the social revolution; they who have the moral courage to stand erect and assert their convictions; stand by them; fight for them; go to jail or to hell for them, if need be — they are writing their names, in this crucial hour — they are writing their names in faceless letters in the history of mankind."

- Eugene V. Debs

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"You remember that, at the close of Theodore Roosevelt’s second term as President, he went over to Africa to make war on some of his ancestors. You remember that, at the close of his expedition, he visited the capitals of Europe; and that he was wined and dined, dignified and glorified by all the Kaisers and Czars and Emperors of the Old World. He visited Potsdam while the Kaiser was there; and, according to the accounts published in the American newspapers, he and the Kaiser were soon on the most familiar terms. They were hilariously intimate with each other, and slapped each other on the back. After Roosevelt had reviewed the Kaiser’s troops, according to the same accounts, he became enthusiastic over the Kaiser’s legions and said: “If I had that kind of an army, I could conquer the world.” He knew the Kaiser then just as well as he knows him now. He knew that he was the Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. And yet, he permitted himself to be entertained by that Beast of Berlin; had his feet under the mahogany of the Beast of Berlin; was cheek by jowl with the Beast of Berlin. And, while Roosevelt was being entertained royally by the German Kaiser, that same Kaiser was putting the leaders of the Socialist Party in jail for fighting the Kaiser and the Junkers of Germany. Roosevelt was the guest of honor in the white house of the Kaiser, while the Socialists were in the jails of the Kaiser for fighting the Kaiser. Who then was fighting for democracy? Roosevelt? Roosevelt, who was honored by the Kaiser, or the Socialists who were in jail by order of the Kaiser? “Birds of a feather flock together.”"

- Eugene V. Debs

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"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact — and it cannot be repeated too often — that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die. That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation. If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace."

- Eugene V. Debs

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"During my stay in Chicago I attended a Labour convention in session in the city...The most striking figure at the convention was Eugene V. Debs. Very tall and lean, he stood out above his comrades in more than a physical sense…Whatever the politicians in his party might be doing, I was sure that he was decent and high-minded. His belief in the people was very genuine, and his vision of socialism quite unlike the State machine pictured in Marx's communist manifesto. Hearing his views, I could not help exclaiming: "Why, Mr. Debs, you're an anarchist!" "Not Mister, but Comrade," he corrected me; "won't you call me that?" Clasping my hand warmly, he assured me that he felt very close to the anarchists, that anarchism was the goal to strive for, and that all socialists should also be anarchists. Socialism to him was only a stepping-stone to the ultimate ideal, which was anarchism. "I know and love Kropotkin and his work," he said; "I admire him and I revere our murdered comrades who lie in Waldheim, as I do also all the other splendid fighters in your movement. You see, then, I am your comrade. I am with you in your struggle." I pointed out that we could not hope to achieve freedom by increasing the power of the State, which the socialists were aiming at. I stressed the fact that political action is the death-knell of the economic struggle. Debs did not dispute me, agreeing that the revolutionary spirit must be kept alive notwithstanding any political objects, but he thought the latter a necessary and practical means of reaching the masses. We parted good friends. Debs was so genial and charming as a human being that one did not mind the lack of political clarity which made him reach out at one and the same time for opposite poles."

- Eugene V. Debs

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"Eugene Debs was a man the likes of which I had never seen before or since. He was a man who expressed love boldly. He loved and kissed the people. Kissing was not common on the puritan prairies, but he kissed comrades and children and women. He couldn't have been made anywhere else but in the Midwest. He knew poetry and the IWW preamble and all the people's expressions. It seemed to me theat his growth actually came from the people, his growth forced upon him by their needs, and he returned to them the image. He was fed, matured, and consumed by the struggles of his time. He loved the American earth and its people. He would sit in our kitchen and recite the death speech of John Brown (abolitionist). He believed in oratory and poetry and love. He was a lanky, tall man, who moved, like so many farm boys, as if the shy body receded backward, hung on the bones; his delicate face and bald head and his whole being were full of a kind of tenderness. He also liked to drink in a bar with the workers and recite poetry, orations, and stories and to listen to theirs. He was a marvelous speaker. In the time of no amplifiers his delicate message rang like a bell, as if his whole being became a resonance. He walked back and forth lifting his long arms and spoke like a lover and a teacher. Arthur had traveled with him on the "Red Special" in the 1908 presidential election. They spoke every hour from the train platform; the farmers stood in the fields to listen, and the workers came down to hear him at the station...I heard Debs tell with wonder how he confronted Jim Hill at the foot of Fourth Street in St. Paul, after he had held up Hill's trains in the Pullman strike of 1896 and how the big cyclops had said that not a man would go out on strike, that he knew every man who worked on his railroad (and he probably did). But they followed Debs and they won the strike, and Debs told how when the train pulled out of the St. Paul station, thousands of railroad workers stood silent and bare-headed beside the track. The greatest tribute ever paid him he said, was when they stood with their shovels and with happiness radiating from their faces, yet with tears in their eyes, their tribute more precious than all the bouquets in the world. These prairie agrarian prophets, these sagas of the people, still rise in the nitrogen of the roots, still live in the protein."

- Eugene V. Debs

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"It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth. Not only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but she always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or modify her own convictions. Had she been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she might have been changed by them; but she was twenty-four, conservative by nature and upbringing, and already crystallized into the cranny of life where she had been born and formed. It was true, his bizarre judgments troubled her in the moments they were uttered, but she ascribed them to his novelty of type and strangeness of living, and they were soon forgotten. Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength of their utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him. She would never have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with wider and deeper concepts. Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers."

- Jack London

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""Take me this way: a stray guest, a bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings through a brief moment of your life--a rude and blundering bird, used to large airs and great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence." So he wrote in a letter to me dated Oakland, December 21, 1899, in the twenty-fourth year of his life. A bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings not only through my life but through life itself, and not for a brief moment but for eternity. For who shall say when that of wonder and beauty which was Jack London will pass from the earth? Who that ever knew him can forget him, and how will life ever forget one who was so indissolubly a part of her? He was youth, adventure, romance. He was a poet and a social revolutionist. He had a genius for friendship. He loved greatly and was greatly beloved...He is the outgrowth of the struggle and the suffering of the Old Order, and he is the strength and the virtue of all its terrible and criminal vices. He came out of the Abyss in which millions of his generation and the generation preceding him throughout time have been hopelessly lost. He rose out of the Abyss, and he escaped from the Abyss to become as large as the race and to be identified with the forces that shape the future of mankind...Later, Jack became the most mellow of thinkers, as passionately promulgating his new ideas as he had then assailed them. He now believed in romantic love, he had helped in the agitation for woman suffrage and was jubilant over its success in California. He was now an absolute internationalist and anti-militarist...He had come far --he had come out on the other side of everything he had before adhered to, as all who knew him were convinced that he would...He lived not only in the wide spaces of the earth, under her tropic suns and in her white frozen silences, with her children of happiness and with her miserable ones, but he lived in the thought always of life and death, and in the timeless and boundaryless struggle of international socialism."

- Jack London

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"[A] simplistic lumper who refuses to make the most elementary analytical distinctions, believing that the concept of new antisemitism hasn't anything to do with fighting bigotry – and everything to do with stifling criticism of Israel; a polemicist with an ugly and sectarian mode of argument and a prose style that is a parody of a once-flourishing antisemitic literature; a lover of the ad hominem attack which leaves the substance of the question unaddressed, preferring to parade before the readers his collection of ... "antisemitism mongers" who should "crawl back into their sewers"; a tendentious joker trading in the indirect expressions of hostility or obscenity; a conspiracy theorist who reduces the history of Holocaust memory to the machinations of the Zionist propaganda machine, and contemporary forms of antisemitism to a public relations exercise; a crude reductionist who prefers a caricatural simplification of the historical process to a careful reconstruction of the dynamics of either collective memory or protean hatreds; a man who normalises antisemitism by telling his audiences that most Jews believe in their group's superiority, talk too much about the Holocaust, are over-represented in the media and use that over-representation for Jewish ends, are tapped into the networks of power and privilege, and who should stop complaining about antisemitism."

- Norman Finkelstein

0 likesAcademics from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesPolitical scientists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United States
"You know, [his voice trembling, hoarse, no more than a whisper] I always thought I'd go first. I don't know why I thought that. It just seemed like I would. I mean, I didn't know him on a daily basis -- far from it. But, in a way, I don't even feel right being here without him. It's so difficult to really believe he's gone. I still talk about him like he's still here, you know. I can't figure it out. It doesn't make any sense. I remember when he got sick in Rome -- I didn't realize then that it was actually a suicide attempt -- I was in Seattle. I went out to grab something to eat and I saw the headlines. That he was in a coma. I just freaked out, man. I went home and made some phone calls, tried to find out what the fuck was going on. Then I started pacing the house and started to cry. I just kept saying, 'Don't go, man, just don't fuckin' go... just don't go.' I kept thinking, 'If he goes, I'm fucked.' You know, all these people man, all lining up to say that his death was so fucking inevitable... well, if it was inevitable for him, it's gonna be inevitable for me, too, if this continues. That's why this could be our last show in fuckin' forever as far as I'm concerned. Kurt's death has changed everything. I don't know if I can do it any more. See, people like him and me, we can't be real. It's a contradiction. We can't be these people who just write these real songs. We have to live up to the expectations of a million people. And we can't do that. And then there's a cynical fuckin' media on top of that. Fuck that, fuck 'em. All along the line, they question your fuckin' honesty. No matter what you say, no matter what you do, they think it's an angle. They think it's all a fuckin' game. Because that's all they're used to. That's what they think it is, a fuckin' game. They don't know what's real and what isn't. And when someone comes along who's trying to be real, they don't know the fuckin' difference. So if you say, 'No, I'm not playing your fuckin' game. I want out... I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that...,' they still think you're part of it. They just can't accept that you don't want to be part of it, that you were never part of it. They just think it's an angle. Some kind of fuckin' angle. And that makes it so hard for somebody who's just trying to be honest. So fuck it. And another thing, we never talked about this but it's like you were saying although we were very different people, there was probably a lot we had in common. We had similar backgrounds, yeah, things that happened with our families and shit... I think that's something that comes out in what we wrote in our songs, definitely. It is kinda similar sometimes. But what makes it more similar is the way people responded to what we wrote and sang about, the intense identification. And I think it was maybe a shock to both of us that so many people were going through the same things. I mean, they understood so completely what we were talking about. And this was shit we thought only he and I were ever gonna have to deal with. Because we kinda wrote these songs for ourselves really. Then all of a sudden, there's all these other people who connect with them and you're suddenly the spokesman for a fuckin' generation. Can you imagine that! A... spokesman... for a... generation."

- Eddie Vedder

0 likesMulti-instrumentalistsGuitarists from the United StatesAlternative rock singersSinger-songwriters from the United StatesSocialists from the United States
"Sometimes it's hard to concentrate these days. I was thinking about the history of this building [Eventim Apollo] and the Bowie history. So I started to think about that and my mind began to wander. It's not a good...So I haven't really been talking about some things and I kind of... now it feels like it's conspicuous because I lost a really close friend of mine, somebody who...I'll say this too, I grew up as 4 boys, 4 brothers, and I lost my brother 2 years ago tragically like that in an accident and after that and losing a few other people, I'm not good at it, meaning I'm not...I have not been willing to accept the reality and that's just how I'm dealing with it (applause starts). No, no, no, no. So I want to be there for the family, be there for the community, be there for my brothers in my band, certainly the brothers in his band. But these things will take time but my friend is going to be gone forever and I will just have to...These things take time and I just want to send this out to everyone who was affected by it and they all back home and here appreciate it so deeply the support and the good thoughts of a man who was a... you know he wasn't just a friend he was someone I looked up to like my older brother. About two days after the news, I think it was the second night we were sleeping in this little cabin near the water, a place he would've loved. And all these memories started coming in about 1:30am like woke me up. Like big memories, memories I would think about all the time. Like the memories were big muscles. And then I couldn't stop the memories. And trying to sleep it was like if the neighbors had the music playing and you couldn't stop it. But then it was fine because then it got into little memories. It just kept going and going and going. And I realized how lucky I was to have hours worth of...you know if each of these memories was quick and I had hours of them. How fortunate was I?! And I didn't want to be sad, wanted to be grateful not sad. I'm still thinking about those memories and I will live with these memories in my heart and I will...love him forever."

- Eddie Vedder

0 likesMulti-instrumentalistsGuitarists from the United StatesAlternative rock singersSinger-songwriters from the United StatesSocialists from the United States
"We find the verses, "I came not to send peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34), and "Let him sell his cloak and buy a sword" (Luke 22:36), which are used as proof that Jesus wanted his disciples to be prepared for war. ...in Matthew, we find that the very next verse reads: "For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. ...If one means that Jesus came to bring a literal sword then the next means that he came as a great home-wrecker, setting the members thereof one against the other. Such a literal interpretation prevents any clear understanding of the words of Jesus. Surely his words, "I came not to send peace but a sword," mean that he came to bring about a sharp division between those who do right and those who do wrong. In Kent's translation of the New Testament, these words read: "I did not come to bring peace, but a struggle. For I came to make a man disagree with his father, a daughter with her mother, and a daughter-in-law with her mother-in-law. It is to be doubted if a single reputable Biblical scholar can be found who will interpret these words to mean that Jesus had reference to a literal sword as a means of accomplishing a desired end. With reference to the passage in Luke, one has only to read the verses that follow to see that Jesus could not have meant these words as a sanction of war. It was the last evening of Jesus life... He himself was about to be reckoned with transgressors and surely his disciples would have to encounter bitter opposition. They must therefore be prepared must be armed must have swords. ...the disciples, promptly misunderstanding Jesus' reference to a sword, reminded him that they had two, and he replied, "It is enough" or according to Moffatt's translation, "Enough! Enough!"). But obviously, two swords were not enough to defend his life from his strong and determined foes; two swords were not enough for war. They were, however, enough and even one was enough, to convey his thought of being prepared for the time of stress that was approaching. Professor Hastings Rashdall, the eminent theologian and philosopher, says in this connection: "More probably the words were 'a piece of ironical foreboding,' which the disciples took literally. The 'it is enough' will then mean, 'Drop that idea: my words were not meant seriously.""

- Kirby Page

0 likesSocialists from the United StatesPacifistsAnti-war activistsAuthors from the United StatesChristians from the United States
"Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?"

- David Bentley Hart

0 likesChristian apologistsChristian socialistsSocialists from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesEssayists from the United States
"What is the connection between alpha and racism? Well, here's one idea. Calling yourself "alpha" basically means that you fetishize male dominance, which likely means that you're extremely anti-feminist, and extreme anti-feminism is often coupled with racism because these beliefs are not as separate as they seem. In fact they form two parts of the white nationalist world-view where the third part is anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism is important because it helps explain why the supposedly naturally dominant white males are losing power to women and minorities. See, the core of the white nationalist world-view is concerned for the purity of white women. This leads to anti-feminism on the one hand because feminism is seen as a threat to traditional gender roles, that make white women subservient and loyal to white men. Non-white races are viewed as a threat to the purity of white women because they're often viewed as barbaric, dangerous, unclean and brutish. This is why xenophobes place so much emphasis on the sexual danger non-white immigrants pose to white women and it's why you'll see endless discussion of news events that validate this fear in white nationalist circles. But notice that this world-view is in need of an explanation for why the supposedly inferior races pose such a serious threat to the supposedly superior whites. Well, this is where the Jews come in. Anti-Semitism is different from other forms of racism in that, instead of being resented for being supposedly brutish and stupid, the Jews are resented for being smart, but in an evil duplicitous cunning sort of way. So the idea is that a Jewish elite is poisoning white society with ideas like multiculturalism, feminism and "Cultural Marxism", thereby leaving it vulnerable to the so-called third world invasion and it seems to me that this world-view is becoming increasingly common which is worrying since, funny though it may be on the fringe, with the wrong mix of power and desperation, the conclusion of these peoples' world view is genocide."

- Natalie Wynn

0 likesPeople from VirginiaEssayists from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesAnti-fascists
"John Reed had burst into my room like a sudden ray of light, the old buoyant, adventurous Jack that I used to know in the States. He was about to return to America, by way of Latvia. Rather a hazardous journey, he said, but he would take even greater risks to bring the inspiring message of Soviet Russia to his native land. "Wonderful, marvellous, isn't it, E.G.?" he exclaimed. "Your dream of years now realized in Russia, your dream scorned and persecuted in my country, but made real by the magic wand of Lenin and his band of despised Bolsheviks. Did you ever expect such a thing to happen in the country ruled by the tsars for centuries?" "Not by Lenin and his comrades, dear Jack," I corrected, "though I do not deny their great part. But by the whole Russian people, preceded by a glorious revolutionary past. No other land of our days has been so literally nurtured by the blood of her martyrs, a long procession of pioneers who went to their death that new life may spring from their graves." Jack insisted that the young generation cannot for ever be tied to the apron-strings of the old, particularly when those strings are tightly drawn around its throat. "Look at your old pioneers, the Breshkovskayas and Tchaikovskys, the Chernovs and Kerenskys and the rest of them," he cried heatedly; "see where they are now! With the Black Hundreds, the Jew-baiters, and the ducal clique, aiding them to crush the Revolution. I don't give a damn for their past. I am concerned only in what the treacherous gang has been doing during the past three years. To the wall with them! I say. I have learned one mighty expressive Russian word, 'razstrellyat'!" (execute by shooting)."

- John Reed (journalist)

0 likesSocialists from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesSocial activistsPoets from the United StatesRevolutionaries
"Throughout much of the twentieth century, state socialism presented an existential challenge to the worst excesses of the free market. The threat posed by Marxist ideologies forced Western governments to expand social safety nets to protect workers from the unpredictable but inevitable booms and busts of the capitalist economy. After the Berlin Wall fell, many celebrated the triumph of the West, consigning socialist ideas to the dustbin of history. But for all its faults, state socialism provided an important foil for capitalism. It was in response to a global discourse of social and economic rights—a discourse that appealed not only to the progressive populations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America but also to many men and women in Western Europe and North America—that politicians agreed to improve working conditions for wage laborers as well as create social programs for children, the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, mitigating exploitation and the growth of income inequality. Although there were important antecedents in the 1980s, once state socialism collapsed, capitalism shook off the constraints of market regulation and income redistribution. Without the looming threat of a rival superpower, the last thirty years of global neoliberalism have witnessed a rapid shriveling of social programs that protect citizens from cyclical instability and financial crises and reduce the vast inequality of economic outcomes between those at the top and bottom of the income distribution."

- Kristen Ghodsee

0 likesWomen academics from the United StatesAnthropologists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesUniversity of California, Berkeley alumni
"I don't want anybody to have to feel hunger the way that I felt hunger. I don't want anybody else to have to live out of their vehicle with their babies. Well, I won't even go into all of that... But my son was a baby [and] my daughter was a baby when we were living out of a car. Something happens to you when you feel like you can't provide for your kids, when you're cold and there's nothing, there's no amount of blankets you can put on yourself to be warm when you're sleeping in a car. You can't keep the car running because you're running down the gas. You can't keep the lights on [or] people know that you're in a car. ... What we need to do is put money into mental health. Take money from [police], put it into education, put money into job training programs, to address substance use issues, right? Into our unhoused population. That's where that money needs to go... You give [police] this money, but then we don't give money to human services. Put it into our health department! Look what happened when COVID hit, again. The areas that are the most marginalized in our communities were the last ones to receive COVID testing and supplies. So that's what we're talking about. That also means you don't need money for tear gas. You don't need money for noise ammunition, and MRAPs and stockpiling SWAT gear."

- Cori Bush

0 likesSocialists from the United States21st-century African-American politiciansWomen activists from the United StatesCivil rights activistsFeminists from the United States
"As an organizer and activist in the movement working to save Black lives, I've seen too many Black children die at the hands of police officers. I've personally been brutalized and assaulted by law enforcement officers during protests and have watched other activists' rights violated while protesting for justice. It is why I hold fast when I fight to fundamentally transform our approach to public safety in our country, so we can save lives and finally achieve true justice and accountability. And as someone who has been evicted, has been unhoused, and has worked low-wage jobs, I know what it's like to struggle to pay rent, keep the heat on, and put food on the kitchen table. In part, it's why I fight so hard for a social safety net that actually meets the needs of those most marginalized by our society so we no longer have to just survive, but so we can thrive. I fight so hard for transformational change because it's right and it's necessary, but also because I've lived through the harms and devastation of police violence, and I know that with more people in positions of power who have an understanding, personally or not, of what it's like to struggle to survive, we can build a more just and equitable world that meets the needs of regular, everyday people like me. (page xvi)"

- Cori Bush

0 likesSocialists from the United States21st-century African-American politiciansWomen activists from the United StatesCivil rights activistsFeminists from the United States
"("Could you speak to young activists who work around issues of identity politics, and what advice would you give them?") Well, the first thing I would say is, you’ve got to work in coalition. You cannot be so — what’s the word? — so immersed in your own particular experiences, your wonderful, multilayered, complex experiences of your identity. You can’t be so immersed in that, that you cannot look out at that person across the room, across the street, in another neighborhood, in another nation, around the globe. You cannot be so immersed in what you are experiencing that you cannot see that wider arc of a need to work for justice and do it in coalition and in solidarity with others. And I think that’s what has been lost. I think that because identity politics and black feminism and some of the things that I have actually helped to establish in academic context, I think that sometimes when they’re talked about in academic context, people don’t understand that, no, what we’re really talking about is positioning ourselves so that we can build a mass movement for positive political change and for justice. So, when people think that the only people we’re talking to are people who have the exact same list of identities that they have, I always say, “Why would I want to work with people who are just like me? That would be boring.” So, that would be my major advice, is take that risk. Take that risk of joining in coalitions, doing work on the ground where you live. Like, if you live in a city, there’s probably — there are a lot of issues, but one of the issues might likely be gun violence. Another one might be poverty or poor housing. Another one might be schools that are not of sufficient quality so that everybody has great opportunities as they grow up and become adults and get into life. See what it would be like to walk into a school board meeting. Do you see what I’m saying? Maybe you do. I bet you do, Amy. But it’s just really so important that we stretch and that we work for justice across the board. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t be in our own — you know, our own safe spaces, in our own kind of home kind of environments. We can do both."

- Barbara Smith

0 likesAfrican-American feministsWomen authors from the United StatesLGBT peopleSocialists from the United States20th-century African-American women
"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? Barbara Smith, one of the founding members of the Combahee River Collective, is among the radical voices that have addressed these questions. Since the heyday of the civil rights movement, she has been telling white people that fighting racism is necessary for their own survival and liberation, not some act of philanthropy to help the downtrodden Negroes of the ghetto. She has been telling black activists that fighting homophobia is their issue because the policing of sexuality, no matter to whom it is directed, affects everyone. And she has been sharply critical of lesbian and movements for the narrowness of their political agendas. She knows what it will take to win freedom. "As a socialist and an alert Black woman, it is clear to me that it is not possible to achieve justice, especially economic justice, and equality under capitalism because capitalism was never designed for that to be the case. The assaults from the present system necessitate that most activists work for reforms, but those of us who are radicals understand that it is possible to do so at the very same time that we work for fundamental change-a revolution.""

- Barbara Smith

0 likesAfrican-American feministsWomen authors from the United StatesLGBT peopleSocialists from the United States20th-century African-American women
"If I had no other pleasant memories to recall than those of the beautiful women I have met who were active in progressive or radical affairs, life would still be worth while. I fell in love with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn when as a young girl she aroused uncounted thousands with her clear, ringing voice to the cause of social revolt. When I think of beauty I know that some on my list would not have passed a jury test for what is called feminine beauty today. But as a jury of one I attest that they were beautiful to my eyes, and their loveliness lingers in retrospect. With no attempt at alphabetical arrangement or making a complete list, I think of Margaret Larkin, Ernestine Evans, Rebecca Drucker, Ruth and Hannah Pickering, Jessica Smith, Crystal Eastman, Marguerite Tucker, Inez Milholland, Genevieve Taggard, Mary Marcy, Doris Stevens, Louise Bryant, Edna Porter, Leane Zugsmith. Freda Kirchwey. Sara Bard Field. Lydia Gibson, Martha Gruening. Clara Gruening Stillman. Jane Burr, Caroline Lowe, Jessica Milne, Mary Ware Dennett, Harriot Stanton Blatch. Margaret Sanger. Helen Black, Mary Heaton Vorse, Anna Strunsky, Louise Adams Floyd, Helen Keller. Grace Potter, Edna Kenton. Helen Todd, Anne Valentine, Carrie Giovannitti, Rose Hanna, Lucy Branham, and Sophia Wittenberg Mumford. And these are only a few of the many I have watched as they did their part in the fight to make this a better world to live in-organizing, picketing, speaking to crowds in halls or on street corners, writing, and raising money. (Chapter 40. Overflow Meeting of Memories)"

- Art Young

0 likesCartoonists from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesPeople from IllinoisPeople from Wisconsin
"On the twenty-ninth day of December he mailed me one of his unique postcards, Art himself toiling up a big hill with all kinds of war birds and "blitzkrieg" around him. The card is inscribed underneath, "It's a long road, but now we are getting somewhere"...Art had been through many hard places in the "road" with me, and our "comradeship" of so many years is even closer than a family. It is our family...He really loved people, like our mutual friends, Gene Debs, Horace Traubel-Whitman's disciple-Fred Long, and a few others, close, and understanding. Now, all of these comrades have passed out of life and we must keep their memories green, paying more attention to the young people the new generation; that was the strong point in the character of Art Young...Art Young is still in our lives. His work remains. We just have to close our ranks, get a little closer with more understanding love and when the history of the "people's culture" of America is written, Art Young's name will shine very brightly. Because of his great talent in illustrating the struggles of the people against fascism in all its forms-not only in art forms, but also in humorous understanding words-he will be understood and loved by the youth of the future, and we older ones, in spite of loneliness and misunderstanding, shall work a little harder to win the war. The word "remember" was also on Art's card. Yes, we will remember and translate that memory into action."

- Art Young

0 likesCartoonists from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesPeople from IllinoisPeople from Wisconsin
"Art Young's drawings are published in the principal Army paper, Red Star, the satirical magazine Crocodile, Ogonyok magazine and others. He belonged to those artists to whom working means fighting for justice, and in our time one cannot fight for justice without being an active anti-fascist. Art Young was our friend and comrade-in-arms because his efforts were directed against Nazism. His biting cartoons appeal to the masses. His hard-hitting style is effective not only in his country but far beyond it. His works, impressive for their clear-cut statement of political themes and simplicity of form, can be achieved only by an experienced master. I have on my table one Art Young drawing dealing with the heroic struggle of the Red Army against Hitler's Germany. Hitler is shown in it. This is one of those social caricatures depicting the loathsome character of the Nazi regime with great impressiveness. Drawings such as this expose the rottenness of Hitler's "New Order" and the monstrosity of Nazi crimes. Thus, a fervent anti-Nazi takes part in the great battle waged by freedom-loving nations against evil forces. The artistic intelligentsia has lost one of its outstanding members. But Art Young's work will live on and call upon his young colleagues to take an active part in the struggle against Hitler's Germany for the happiness of mankind."

- Art Young

0 likesCartoonists from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesPeople from IllinoisPeople from Wisconsin
"Sometimes I'm lonely, but I am never discouraged," Art said to my sister Katherine, her daughter Frances, and me, when we were together at what was to be his last supper. He died a few hours later. In retrospect, it seemed as if he unconsciously spoke his own epitaph, not in a somber or foreboding spirit but in his naturally philosophical and calm manner. "I figure I should be able to live another twenty years," he continued, "and I know that in that time I will see socialism spread through the world." Our conversation was desultory-now serious, now gay, but with an undercurrent of the great changes taking place in the world, of which he was so keenly aware...He spoke considerably on longevity that night, of George Bernard Shaw and Mother Bloor and of our mother...He was a consistent and courageous admirer of the Soviet Union and the Red Army and described himself to me more than once as "A non-party Bolshevik." He had an extraordinary capacity to remain friends with people far removed from his social ideas-if they were honest in their views. But he would never sell his talents for what he disbelieved in, no matter how great his personal sacrifices. His friendship with Brisbane was on this basis...Art Young was gentle in manner, kindly and reassuring. But he was a great fighter against injustice, poverty, inequalities, and against fascism in all its forms. He was never downhearted about the progress of the world. He spoke to us rather regretfully that night about having to sell his little place in Connecticut where he had always planned to have a museum for his pictures and which he had started to build, I believe, or at least had designed. "I got a little money to live a little longer," he said. He said once to his friend Marguerite Tucker: "If I was in the Soviet Union I would be a people's artist and would not need to worry about money."

- Art Young

0 likesCartoonists from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesPeople from IllinoisPeople from Wisconsin
"He was a great artist with a generous heart full of feeling and understanding. He suffered with the struggles of the downtrodden, and sided with them in their plights. When an injustice had been committed, he flashed his sharp pen and brush against the tyrants and fascists. His art, like himself, had a keen wit that penetrated deeply. Wherever and whenever Art Young's name is mentioned, people, without exception, express a love for the man and his work. He was truly a people's artist...I once asked him if he ever felt lousy about any cartoon he had done, and he told us of one he had been asked to draw for the old Life, when it was a humorous weekly. The editor had asked for a double-page spread, on which he was to draw a comic figure of a Jewish Broadway producer controlling the gay White Way. Art finished the drawing and received a hundred-dollar check which he needed very badly. But he was somehow not very happy about the idea. At that time, Art recalled, we had no political awareness, no organizations that fought anti-Semitism. So he went to the editor, returned the check and asked for his cartoon back. He walked down the street tearing it up, and with every rip he said he felt happy, although hungry. To most of us artists, Art Young was more than a friend; more than a fellow-artist who for so many years had worked with us, with whom we had exchanged confidences. We all had a special respect for Art Young. He carried with dignity our convictions, and in trying times, when some writers of the old Masses and Liberator went sour one way or another, Art Young stood fast, and the artists were with him. The works of Art Young will live, and the principles and spirit that Art Young stood for will remain an outstanding inspiration, an everlasting monument to a great man and a great artist."

- Art Young

0 likesCartoonists from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesPeople from IllinoisPeople from Wisconsin
"For a brief time, roughly between 1912 and 1918, The Masses became the rallying center-as sometimes also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring-for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture. In its pages you could find brilliant artists and cartoonists, like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Art Young; one of the best journalists in our history, John Reed (journalist), a writer full of an indignation against American injustice that was itself utterly American; a shrewd and caustic propagandist like Max Eastman; some gifted writers of fiction, like Sherwood Anderson; and one of the few serious theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling. All joined in a rumpus of revolt, tearing to shreds the genteel tradition that had been dominant in American culture, poking fun at moral prudishness and literary timidity, mocking the deceits of bourgeois individualism, and preaching a peculiarly uncomplicated version of the class struggle. There has never been, and probably never will again be, another radical magazine in the U. S. quite like The Masses, with its slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope...As one looks back across the shambles of the intervening decades, it is hard not to envy them: the fierce young John Reed (journalist) making his prose into a lyric of revolt, the handsome young Max Eastman mediating among a raucus of opinions, the cherubic Art Young drawing his revolutionary cartoons with the other worldly aplomb of a Bronson Alcott. History cannot be recalled, but in this instance at least, nostalgia seems a part of realism. For who among us, if enabled by some feat of imagination, would not change places with the men of The Masses in their days of glory?"

- Art Young

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"It was in 1917 that my teacher and I first met Art Young at our Forest Hills home. He was a guest whom Anne Sullivan Macy especially welcomed. Her many-faceted personality was an open book to him. Then his delightful kindliness, humor, sudden whims, sincerity, and the dreams of beauty hovering round his fighting citadel endeared him to her kindred spirit. At a time when reaction was riding roughshod over the earth and throttling those who protested against the betrayal of the people's aspiration to genuine liberty by the capitalist empires, Art Young was emerging from his trial for anti-war charges a gentle yet formidable Samson, and I recall the gay courage with which he defied any power to muzzle the thunder and lightning of his art. It was a marvel how many truths he packed into pictures which opened blind eyes to our community of fate and interest with the downtrodden and the toilers of the world. Some of Art Young's drawings were embossed for me, and I sensed vividly the highly individual and forceful manner in which he presented with the brush ideas that he hoped would serve as a ferment in American economic philosophy. My fingers could appreciate his pictorial power in uncovering hell and its network of race prejudice and enslavement. A year never passed during which I was not thrilled by his inventiveness in devising themes that provoked wide discussion and pushed further the painfully slow campaign of education in true freedom among the working people. Little by little the pillars loosened at which his Samson hatred of oppression tugged, and it is devoutly to be hoped that his death has left them irrevocably sagging to their downfall. There is no calculating the might of patient efforts like his which quietly root themselves in the granite of tyranny and crumble it into life-giving soil. Besides the keen-eyed radical and uncompromising idealist there was another aspect of Art Young I knew-his brimming joy in all things friendly and wholesome, all things that foster song, laughter, and poetry. He said the song of a bird or a burst of morning-glories at this door or a sparkle of dew-wet verdure was enough to crowd new ideas into his day, and evening peace flooded his imagination with fantastic beckoning forms in the trees around him. In all moods, places, and activities he sought to make his labors a telling force in a future that would enable everyone with a special gift or genius to achieve a nobler civilization."

- Art Young

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""Tell me the story of your life!" With an owlish solemnity equal to my own, he replied: "I was born in Illinois, studied in Paris,-But the rest doesn't matter-at least not yet? A man must be dead at least fifty years before we can take a human interest in these dry facts of his early life. "I would rather draw political cartoons than anything else;" said Mr. Young. "I believe in the picture with a purpose. There must be a vital idea back of every drawing that is really worth while. I have no patience with these so-called artists who expect intricate technicality to make up for a lack of ideas. In fact, I don't believe in technique at all...Real art is, in the last analysis, simply self-expression. Socialism always has been and suppose always will be the keynote of my work. To me it is the culmination of all radicalism and the thought back of most of my drawings. I have been very fortunate in being allowed considerable freedom in this direction even when employed by capitalist papers. But you see," he concluded naively, "I made that a condition of my work." He summed up the purpose of his work in the following words simplicity and strength. The proud possessor of an idea must present it simply and with sufficient force to make it comprehensible to the proletarian for whom Mr. Young states that all his work is done. "It is the working man, seated by his lamp in the evenings in his shirt sleeves pouring over the evening paper for whom I make my drawings." There was no affectation, no posing, nothing but the most virile and yet child-like simplicity here. Strength and simplicity are, he says the keynote of all good work. And that was the strongest impression of the interview, as it was of the studio, as it is of his work, as it seems to be of the man himself-strength and simplicity."

- Art Young

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"I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the fire-proof structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are burned to death. We have tried you, citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and daughters and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us. Public officials have only words of warning to us-warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back when we rise into the conditions that make life bearable. I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement."

- Rose Schneiderman

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"I see no hope of functioning 100 percent in the interest of the common people except through the Socialist Party, and hereby apply for readmission to membership. I left the party because I considered dangerous the party’s attitude toward America’s participation in the war; but the crisis created by the St. Louis resolution is past, and the present immediate danger is an imperialistic peace which, I believe, only a unified and strengthened international Socialist movement can prevent. I thrill to think how rapidly the world would move forward if, for instance, the German Social Democracy were to unite — if the party of the right were to unite with the party of the left — and sweep the Hohenzollerns out of power, or if the several parties of the Social Revolution in Russia were to sink their differences and go to the heart of their common purpose; or if in Italy, France, and England there were but one unified expression of the Socialist movement; and because my heart cries out to them, “Comrades, unite!” I am brought to a keen realization of my own remissness. If I see and deplore the results of disruption and desire unity for my Comrades abroad, I must surely strive for unity here, where 90 percent of the American people, whose hearts beat warm as any in the world for humanity, need to stand as unitedly against their own and the world’s anti-humanitarian 10 percent, as the 90 percent of any other country. President Wilson’s last message; the British and French government’s failure to meet fully and in a spirit of frankness the democratic implications of it; the imprisonment in Germany of 300 of her left wing Socialists; the counterrevolutionary attempts in Russia, where an unseen hand not Russia’s seems to be playing fast and loose — these four significant events are among the foremost impelling me to rejoin the Socialist Party. I beg, dear Comrades, that you admit me again to your ranks."

- Rose Pastor Stokes

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"Some of us got to know about the Socialist Literary Society on the East Side of New York, East Broadway. It was chiefly a young men's club, but some of the young ladies wanted to join...I remember the hot debates that went on at the Socialist Literary Society whether to admit women, and finally the women won out. They voted to admit women, so...We joined the Socialist Literary Society, and there, really, we obtained what we could in the way of education, especially with English literature. The club was very fortunate in obtaining the services of Dr. Henry Newman, no relation of mine, but who was a professor of literature at City College of New York. I think he still is with the Brooklyn Ethical Cultural Society. He was a magnificent teacher. I don't think there are many who can surpass his interest in the students and in the people who came to his classes. And I, personally, shall never forget his kindness and attention. I remember he was teaching us English literature, giving us an idea of what George Eliot and Thackeray and Dickens were about. And he would ask questions to find out whether we really got his point... He was terribly interested in my reading, and I still remember his kindness and attention, because he was a great help to me. Lord knows what I might have read if it weren't for him."

- Pauline Newman (labor activist)

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