Civil Rights Activists

"We have had the greatest heroine of the age here, Harriet Tubman, a , and a fugitive slave, who has been back eight times secretly and brought out in all sixty slaves with her, including all her own family, besides aiding many more in other ways to escape. Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction and her ingenuity and generalship are extraordinary. I have known her for some time and mentioned her in speeches once or twice — the slaves call her Moses. She has had a reward of twelve thousand dollars offered for her in Maryland and will probably be burned alive whenever she is caught, which she probably will be, first or last, as she is going again. She has been in the habit of working in hotels all summer and laying up money for this crusade in the winter. She is jet black and cannot read or write, only talk, besides acting."

"Numerous American heroes-such as Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and Henry David Thoreau-led rebellious acts to reconcile the government's actions with the country's promise of liberty for all its citizens."

"We have a woman in our country who has received the name of "Moses," not by lying about it, but by acting out -a woman who has gone down into the Egypt of slavery and brought out hundreds of our people into liberty. The last time I saw that woman, her hands were swollen. That woman who had led one of Montgomery's most successful expeditions, who was brave enough and secretive enough to act as a scout for the American army, had her hands all swollen from a conflict with a brutal conductor, who undertook to eject her from her place. That woman, whose courage and bravery won a recognition from our army and from every black man in the land, is excluded from every thoroughfare of travel."

"I never met any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God."

"Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day — you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt " God bless you " has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you. It is to me a great pleasure and a great privilege to bear testimony to your character and your works, and to say to those to whom you may come, that I regard you in every way truthful and trustworthy."

"When slaves sang, "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home, they may have appeared to be evoking freedom in the afterlife, but wasn't it true that they were also singing about Harriet Tubman-the chariot, Harriet, who rescued so many women and men, helping them to discover freedom in this life?"

"When she made it to freedom after having been a slave and she got to New York and she could have been so happy to just stay at home and just breathe a big sigh of relief but she kept going back down South to bring other freed slaves to freedom. And she used to say, "No matter what happens, keep going.""

"I’m obsessed with Harriet Tubman. I’m obsessed with, what was it like to walk in her shoes and to face her fears? So I always want to reach back and be like, OK, well, now what is the Harriet Tubman activity to do, in this time? And what is Harriet Tubman up to in 2063? — because there’s always someplace that needs justice and liberation."

"I looked at my hands, to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory over everything, de sun came like gold trou de trees, and over de fields, and I felt like I was in heaven."

"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

"I can't die but once."

"I prayed all night long for my master. Till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me. I changed my prayer. First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way'."

"She made nineteen dangerous trips back and forth, often disguised, escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom, always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives, "You'll be free or die." She expressed her philosophy: "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive....""

"We actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God."

"Maxwell's equations... originally consisted of eight equations. These equations are not "beautiful." They do not possess much symmetry. In their original form, they are ugly. ...However, when rewritten using time as the fourth dimension, this rather awkward set of eight equations collapses into a single tensor equation. This is what a physicist calls "beauty," because both criteria are now satisfied."

"If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that's where we're headed."

"When Physicists speak of "beauty" in their theories, they really mean that their theory possesses at least two essential features: 1. A unifying symmetry 2. The ability to explain vast amounts of experimental data with the most economical mathematical expressions."

"I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization... The danger is the transition between type zero and type one and that’s where we are today. We are a type zero civilization. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But if you get a calculator you can calculate when we will attain type one status. The answer is: in about 100 years we will become planetary. We’ll be able to harness all the energy output of the planet earth. We’ll play with the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes. Anything planetary we will play with. The danger period is now, because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian, fundamentalist ideas circulating around, but we also have nuclear weapons. ...capable of wiping out life on earth. So I see two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward a multicultural, scientific, tolerant society and everywhere I go I see aspects of that birth. For example, what is the Internet? Many people have written about the Internet. Billions and billions of words written about the Internet, but to me as a physicist the Internet is the beginning of a type one telephone system, a planetary telephone system. So we’re privileged to be alive to witness the birth of type one technology... And what is the European Union? The European Union is the beginning of a type one economy. And how come these European countries, which have slaughtered each other ever since the ice melted 10,000 years ago, how come they have banded together, put aside their differences to create the European Union? ...so we’re beginning to see the beginning of a type one economy as well..."

"Michio Kaku... will talk, waxing rhapsodically, about the Mind of God and how everything is encrypted and encoded, and if we can get to the multiverse, and that really would be the singularity... I like Michio. He's very good as an entertainer, but I think the selling of physics is going to come back to haunt us... Just touting this stuff, and I'm guilty of it at times too, but I won't utter... "The Mind of God." What do you think about the danger that we, as people that are publicly facing, have of potentially compromising the true appreciation of the most magnificent things in the universe, which take a lot of background. You can't dumb it down, and you shouldn't. I will never do that with my audience."

""Killer asteroids are nature's way of asking, 'How's that space program coming along?'" - Anonymous"

"It is as inescapable as the laws of physics that humanity will one day confront some type of extinction-level event. But will we, like our ancestors, have the drive and determination to survive and even flourish? . . . On a scale of decades, we face threats that are not natural but are largely self-inflicted [including] global warming . . . modern warfare as nuclear weapons proliferate in some of the most unstable regions of the globe, [or] weaponized microbes [that could conceivably] wipe out 98 percent of the human race. . . . On a scale of thousands of years, we face the onset of another ice age [or] the possibility that the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park may awaken from its long slumber . . . . On a scale of millions of years, we face the threat of another meteor or cometary impact . . . . We now know that there are several thousand NEOs (near-Earth objects) that cross the orbit of the Earth and pose a danger to life on our planet. . . . If there is one lesson we can learn from our history, it is that humanity, when faced with life-threatening crises, has risen to the challenge and reached for even higher goals. In some sense, the spirit of exploration is in our genes and hardwired into our soul. [So] now we face perhaps the greatest challenge of all: to leave the confines of Earth and soar into outer space. . . . Perhaps our fate is to become a multiplanet species that lives among the stars."

"It is sometimes helpful to differentiate between the God of Miracles and the God of Order. When scientists use the word God, they usually mean the God of Order. ...The God of Miracles intervenes in our affairs, performs miracles, destroys wicked cities, smites enemy armies, drowns the Pharaoh's troops, and avenges the pure and noble. ...This is not to say that miracles cannot happen, only that they are outside what is commonly called science."

"Mathematics... is the set of all possible self-consistent structures, and there are vastly more logical structures than physical principles."

"Remarkably, only a handful of fundamental physical principles are sufficient to summarize most of modern physics."

"No other theory known to science [other than superstring theory] uses such powerful mathematics at such a fundamental level. ...because any unified field theory first must absorb the Riemannian geometry of Einstein's theory and the Lie groups coming from quantum field theory... The new mathematics, which is responsible for the merger of these two theories, is topology, and it is responsible for accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of abolishing the infinities of a quantum theory of gravity."

"There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. … Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. .. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest."

"It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."

"What happened before the Big Bang? Are there other universes? What lies on the other side of creation? The other side of a black hole? Are s possible? s? s? Do we live in a multiverse? All these questions cannot be answered with our present-day understanding."

"Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first."

"There was a new popular music of protest. Pete Seeger had been singing protest songs since the forties, but now he came into his own, his audiences much larger. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, singing not only protest songs, but songs reflecting the new abandon, the new culture, became popular idols. A middle-aged woman on the West Coast, Malvina Reynolds, wrote and sang songs that fit her socialist thinking and her libertarian spirit, as well as her critique of the modern commercial culture."

"the first time I heard Pete Seeger was on TV with the Weavers doing the Hootenanny. But I didn’t know him as Pete Seeger...I met him as a human being because of the Albany, Georgia civil rights movement in the 1960s. And he actually thought the singing in Southwest Georgia was so powerful that they should organize a singing group. And he talked about the Almanac Singers and the Weavers and said to Jim Forman of SNCC, “If you organized a group, you would have a group that could travel all over the country singing songs about the movement, and they might also bring financial support to the movement”...The other thing that Seeger taught me was the idea of a working singer, that you did not have to be a star. You had to know you were a singer. You had to know what your music was. And you had to be willing to do it for the rest of your life, as long as you had voice. And people would keep up with you. They would catch up with you if you did not go away. And it was a very important model for a young singer. And as a Freedom Singer, we made $10 a week. It was the perfect way to start my career as a musician, but it was looking at Pete Seeger and his years and years of doing music as a part of struggle that really inspired me. He was a very important model. And what’s incredible is that he has not — he has not broken stride in any way."

"my first experience with Pete Seeger was weaning me from rhythm and blues, which — as my parents badly wanted to do. They were horrified. They thought all rhythm and blues singers were dope addicts, even though they didn’t know what dope addicts were. So my auntie — they spirited me away with my auntie to a Pete Seeger show. And it was like a vaccine. Either it was going to take or not. And it took. And I loved the music, and I discovered that this man did what my family, in a sense, had done for many years, which was, having become Quakers when I was eight years old, fused everything with their politics. And this was music and politics in a way that I had never known. But it was so natural to me, his music and what he did with his life. And I understood that very quickly. And when I found out at an early age — I don’t know if this is myth or not, but when the press went to his house for an interview at one point, that he was on the roof tacking a few of the last shingles on, and he wouldn’t come down, and he was ready. I knew this was a man I wanted to follow for his political and musical events that he did. And so, I did. There was Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Pete. And I listened to Pete’s music endlessly and heard the stories about him and learned his songs and followed him."

"If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning I'd hammer in the evening, All over this land. I'd hammer out danger, I'd hammer out a warning, I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters, All over this land... Well I got a hammer, And I got a bell, And I got a song to sing, all over this land. It's the hammer of Justice, It's the bell of Freedom, It's the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters, All over this land."

"If singing were all that serious, frowning would make you sound better."

"At the audition, your assignment is to find something new in the song. Something you've never noticed before. A breath carried over, a thought that ties the whole thing together. Then take the risk and do it."

""So, are you going to practice today?" asks my inner mom. "Well, sure. But I've got one more phone call to make. The dishes are dirty. I have to feed the cat." I don't hate practicing. I resist it. The goddess of procrastination can seduce me by lifting one eyebrow. After decades of practicing or avoiding the same, walking over to the piano remains the hardest part."

"The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be."

"A productive mistake is: (1) made in the service of mission and vision; (2) acknowledged as a mistake; (3) learned from; (4) considered valuable; (5) shared for the benefit of all."

"Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music."

"If it can't be … reused, repaired … then it should be … redesigned or removed from production."

"The key to the future of the world, is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known."

"I feel most spiritual when I'm out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it's all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something I'm listening to God."

"The world will be saved by people fighting for their homes."

"There's no hope, but I may be wrong."

"The world would never amount to a hill of beans if people didn't use their imaginations to think of the impossible."

"I'd really rather put songs on people's lips than in their ears."

"When I meet people who say, "Oh, there's no hope, Peter, look at the things that are going wrong, and those stupid people in Bosnia, there are going to be things like that all around the world, power-hungry people says I know how to handle this, just give me the bomb. There's no hope." But I say to them, I said, "Did you ever think that our great Watergate president would leave office the way he did?" "No, I guess I didn't think that." I said, "Did you think that the Berlin Wall would come down so peacefully?" "No, I didn't think that would happen, yeah." I said, "Did you think Mandela would be president of South Africa?" "No, I didn't predict that." "Well, if you couldn't predict those three things, then don't be so confident that there's no hope." And I give them a bumper sticker. It says, "There's No Hope, But I May Be Wrong.""

"I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."

"I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other."

"All songwriters are links in a chain."