Editors From The United States

"How, then, should American literature deal with these people, crushed for centuries beneath an insufferable weight of exploitation, calumny and derision, yet always rising, their presence and their struggle ever mocking the strident pretensions of the nation?"

"He had a mordant wit, always saw the humorous side to keep us all 'cracked up,' and could recite poetry by the yard. At the same time, he had an ability to put words down on paper with a speed and precision... He had a far-above-average ability to marshal his facts through well-documented research and translate his material into well-written and convincing prose."

"[Burnham was] one of the loveliest human beings I've ever met... A rich cultural apostle who swam in music, poetry, and literature... always pleasant company... a great facility to move in all kinds of circles... a most eloquent public speaker [who] could engage an audience at will."

"A man touched with grace, easy to be with and reassuring. In his writings, lectures, and conversation, he never dissembled. His seriousness, manifest in his painstakingly careful speech, was leavened by high humor. The love that people bore him was demonstrated in his hosts of friends—from the teenagers on his Brooklyn block, through the bearded youngsters who came to him for counsel, to the patrician figure of Du Bois, his mentor and his colleague."

"[An] altogether commanding personality... His voice was very deep and his language struck my senses immediately with its profound literacy, constantly punctuated by deliberate and loving poetic lapses into the beloved color of the speech of the masses of our people... The things he taught me were great things: that all racism was rotten, White or Black, that [emphasis in the original] everything is political; that people tend to be indescribably beautiful and uproariously funny.”"

"Any art should be advertising for one's soul."

"Our story is not really ours until we tell it, until it belongs to others too."

"Film photography just makes such an ally of chance, and chance is essential to any valid art, to the poetic…to life, to the spiritual."

"Making a documentary is like having a dream. You can’t really anticipate what it will be. You have to constantly yield to whatever is manifested before you, to have the courage for whatever is revealed to you. Whatever truth confesses itself, even if it’s not what you anticipated. To just be a mirror. To invite in whatever arrives. To reflect it as loyally."

"Don’t hunt for what to photograph. Let images find you. You wander your desert until worthy mirage appears. Wait until that worthy shot comes. And then try to capture it."

"(William) Burroughs was all about the future. Was all about liberation through the dismantling of presiding orders. He was a big influence on punk culture and punk music (and me) for that reason."

"Photography is a hunt. But one that ends in the immortality of the prey, rather than the prey’s death."

"(Lydia) Lunch and a lot of the no wave musicians were imbued with the wisdom—and neuroses—of genuine trauma. There's the divine madness in them. When Suicide's Alan Vega sneered, you might have actually found yourself bloodied shortly thereafter. You sure as hell wouldn't reach for your iPhone to Instagram and tag his #antics. You'd feel a little intruded upon, which is precisely how all the best art should make you feel."

"He led primarily by virtue of the power of attraction of his example... He left his imprint on a whole generation of Southerners... He was a hero in the practical struggles for equality and justice in the Deep South who had marched often in the shadow of death in Willie McGhee country in Mississippi, and under the guns of the police chief “Bull” Conner in Birmingham, Alabama... He was a talented writer and an incomparable orator. He was a fine scholar and an inspiring organizer of social action."

"All lovers are runaways, are fugitives. Inheriting the entire world on that journey. Escaping to one another."

"Love is at essence ritual of tandem fate, of harmonized experience. It’s a holy thing, that merging of consciousness. Our minds become authored by so many of the same events, colored by so much mutual memory."

"Nostalgia is an illness. A symptom of the dying, of those who have more life behind them than before them."

"There is no artistic worth in compromise, in a pair, in collaboration, in obedient unity. These are all impossible terms. Action must come from the individual. The group (even if just a population of two) is only capable of reaction."

"Patience is the only honest muse. In writing, in painting, and especially in photography."

"Love is never more than a faith, and that’s why it’s so exciting."

"Above all none can forget his honesty and utter sacrifice."

"Even today, you know, when I’m kind of in deep middle age, older people will come up to me who remember my father and — who just remember. He had a lot of grace, and was a very welcoming person, and he’s remembered in that way."

"This is not cinema harnessing life; this is life harnessing cinema. Not a film. An attempt at a film. The imperfect effort is ever present, mischievously decorating every frame. Reminding us: one never actually makes a film—one merely attempts to make a film. Reminding us: one never actually lives—one attempts to live."

"Collective subversion is conformity. The only true revolution is the singular one."

"Media technology will place a barrier before us. The barrier of a mirror. It is too loyal to history and the history it preserves will become constantly present. No longer a cultural past merely documented, but a past alive. Eternal. So that it is no longer past, but a continuous present that cycles and repeats endlessly, disallowing the possibility of a future. Static memory. Memory uninterrupted by the present."

"There was no great awakening or such. I did some magazine cartooning years before, but never perused it much. It was just a "freak" opportunity that came up at Hanna-Barbera"

"In very many ways, Joe was the quintessential cigar chompin’ Hollywood producer. In far many others he was atypical in that role. He could keep his focus when everything about him was going completely bonkers, either from network fiat or his own crew running riot. And he always retained his compassion and empathy. I’m sorry he didn’t get to do more projects that he wanted to do, not stuff the networks forced him into producing. I’m glad I had the chance to work for him."

"Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a tenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands of human beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers, where crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcome of all visitors."

"It's a test mentally, physically and spiritually at times. You must try to stay in the process of creating, which will always have obstacles."

"I thought I could put my creativity to use in a good way and give the neighborhoods a voice and maybe change my own situation while doing it."

"I started to write a screenplay on people’s stories and what they were going through."

"We probably had a one percent chance at succeeding because most people who attempt to do this fail, but if you’re not afraid to fail let’s go for it."

"Some historians' reluctance to utilize victim testimony in their con-struction of Holocaust history may be a result of a prejudice among them to utilize only 'official documents' or to combat accusations of Holocaust deniers by being able to demonstrate the facts through the words of the Nazis themselves."

"Hitler’s regime eliminated small corporations and made membership in cartels mandatory. The Reich Economic Chamber was at the top of a complicated bureaucracy comprising nearly two hundred organizations organized along industry, commercial, and craft lines, as well as several national councils. The Labor Front, an extension of the Nazi Party, directed all labor matters, including wages and assignment of workers to particular jobs."

"The fascist leaders’ antagonism to communism has been misinterpreted as an affinity for capitalism. In fact, fascists’ anticommunism was motivated by a belief that in the collectivist milieu of early-twentieth-century Europe, communism was its closest rival for people’s allegiance. As with communism, under fascism, every citizen was regarded as an employee and tenant of the totalitarian, party-dominated state."

"Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically."

"Under fascism, the state, through official cartels, controlled all aspects of manufacturing, commerce, finance, and agriculture. Planning boards set product lines, production levels, prices, wages, working conditions, and the size of firms. Licensing was ubiquitous; no economic activity could be undertaken without government permission. Levels of consumption were dictated by the state, and “excess” incomes had to be surrendered as taxes or “loans.” The consequent burdening of manufacturers gave advantages to foreign firms wishing to export."

"Fascism embodied corporatism, in which political representation was based on trade and industry rather than on geography. In this, fascism revealed its roots in syndicalism, a form of socialism originating on the left."

"Socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners."

"Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it."

"Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities."

"As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer."

"Fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie."

"The triumph of a raw populism, embodied by a shameless demagogue, over both the official establishment and the official ideology of a major political party."

"Trumpism is also a celebrity-driven , forged by its leader’s unique reality-television appeal. This has made it relatively easy for the Republican Party’s leaders to hope that his campaign is sui generis, that when he loses in November (as most of them still expect) there won’t be a coherent Trumpism after Trump."

"Conservatism-under-liberalism should defend human goods that are threatened by liberal ideas taken to extremes. The family, when liberal freedom becomes a corrosive hyper-individualism. Traditional religion, when liberal toleration becomes a militant and superstitious secularism. Local community and local knowledge, against expert certainty and bureaucratic centralization. Artistic and intellectual greatness, when democratic taste turns philistine or liberal intellectuals become apparatchiks. The individual talent of the entrepreneur or businessman, against the leveling impulses of egalitarianism and the stultifying power of monopoly."

"Don’t get me wrong: I believe that people who circumcise for religious reasons should have the right to do so."

"Here’s what Viktor Orban knows: that “liberalism” has produced a society and a culture that despises itself, and is committing suicide. It hates the traditional family. It hates Judeo-Christian religion and moral norms. It hates the history and traditions of the countries where it governs. It hates certain people because of the color of their skin, and loves others because of the color of their skin — in both cases, irrespective of the content of their character. It has no respect for free speech, freedom of religion, and other traditional liberties. It believes that it has the right and responsibility to spread its beliefs globally. It has conquered every institution in the West — most importantly, Big Business — and is using soft power to silence and marginalize the “deplorable” people who disagree. The news media lie by commission and omission in order to prop up the Narrative. This is not liberalism. This is illiberal leftism, which wears liberalism like a skin suit."

"Europeans think its weird for American Gentiles to be circumcised, and I think they’re right … but I remember the one kid we had in my elementary school class, a black boy who had been born at home, and who was not circumcised. All us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that."

"Notice that none of this has to do with the government. If you think totalitarianism is only something that the state can impose, you’re wrong. This is what Woke Capitalism is doing to us. We are in a different world now."