Essayists From The United States

"If a movement is not a threat, it cannot change a system based on centralized coercion and violence, and if that movement does not realize and exercise the power that makes it a threat, it cannot destroy such a system."

"In the world today, governments and corporations hold a near-total monopoly on power, a major aspect of which is violence. Unless we change the power relationships (and, preferably, destroy the infrastructure and culture of centralized power to make impossible the subjugation of the many to the few), those who currently benefit from the ubiquitous structural violence, who control the militaries, banks, bureaucracies, and corporations, will continue to call the shots. The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience. Individuals who do change their minds and find a better morality will be fired, impeached, replaced, recalled, assassinated."

"We believe that tactics should be chosen to fit the particular situation, not drawn from a preconceived moral code."

"Time and again, people struggling not for some token reform but for complete liberation — the reclamation of control over our own lives and the power to negotiate our own relationships with the people and world around us — will find that nonviolence does not work, that we face a self-perpetuating power structure that is immune to appeals to conscience and strong enough to plow over the disobedient and uncooperative."

"Capitalists and their predecessors—slaveowners, moneylenders, merchant-investors—owe their very existence to the State. In early times, concentration of political and spiritual power precedes economic stratification in society."

"Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement’s demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary “critical mass.”"

"Free speech does not empower us, and it does not equal freedom. Free speech is a privilege that can be — and is — taken away by the government when it serves their interests."

"The state is not a passive thing. If it wants to repress a movement or organization, it does not wait for an excuse, it manufactures one."

"Pacifism goes hand in hand with efforts to centralize and control the movement. The concept is inherently authoritarian and incompatible with anarchism because it denies people the right to self-determination in directing their own struggles. The pacifist reliance on centralization and control (with a leadership that can take “vigorous efforts” to “prevent destructive behavior”) preserves the state within the movement, and preserves hierarchical structures to assist state negotiations (and state repression)."

"Those who hold that it is no matter what happens after them, hold a wicked and inhuman doctrine... When we feel in our hearts this indifference to the fleeting, and this warm regard for the permanent, let us believe that God has implanted the instinct for a wise purpose; and then follow it as a heavenly guide. It is manifestly intended to turn us from the labors of the day — from the things which perish when the hand which formed ceases to uphold them — to tile things and objects which endure through indefinite ages — renewing, I should rather say augmenting their magnitude and their benificent fruits with every successive generation."

"Probably there is no department of science, no form o humanity, in which greater advances have been made of late years, than in the medical and moral management of the insane. When we contrast the spacious and airy apartments of the insane. When we contrast the spacious and airy apartments and the grounds of our asylums, with the dark, and narrow, and dirty cells, in which, twenty years ago, the best accommodated of these poor creatures were immured - their neat and confortable dress, with their former rags and nakedness - their wholesome food, with their former rags and nakedness - their wholesome food, their former rations - and abovel all, the kindness and affection which is shown to them noew, with their ulter neglect in the days when they were executed from the privileges and society of men, we find ourselves shuddering at the thought of what we have seen, and lost in admiration of what we now see. Wherever the Christian religion exists,we find the same rapid advances making towards the accomplishment of the great purposes of humanity. It seems as if the miracles of our Saviour were meant as protoypes of what his religion was to accomplish. It is by the influence of this religion of the march of science and philosophical discovery, that, by all Christian nations, the winds and the waves have been rebuked - that man is enabled to ride out the storm upon the ocean, as if it were hushed, and, like Peter of old, to walk upon the sea as on dry land."

"A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity.The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power.Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual."

"Either we will sink into a final coma and end it all or, as I trust and believe, we will awaken to the truth of our peril, a truth as great as life itself, and, like a person who has swallowed a lethal poison but shakes off his stupor at the last moment and vomits the poison up, we will break through the layers of our denials, put aside our fainthearted excuses, and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons."

"What happened at Hiroshima was less than a millionth part of a holocaust at present levels of world nuclear armament."

"The Hiroshima people’s experience, is a picture of what our whole world is always poised to become, a backdrop of scarcely imaginable horror lying just behind the surface of our normal life, and capable of breaking through into that normal life at any second.”—The New Yorker, February 1, 1982."

"When we start fighting crime by any means necessary we become guilty of the same hypocrisy as law enforcement agencies throughout history that break the rules to get the villains, and so become villains themselves."

"This is not the “rule of law”...it is the “rule of law enforcement.”"

"The main point seems to be that I'm arrogant and narcissistic, which should be news to exactly four people."

"The truth is that I am a sentient computer program and I fully intend to burn your cities to the ground."

"I would love to debate any politician in any western state on the question of whether the rule of law ought to be respected in a world where even the most "respectable" governments establish intelligence agencies that routinely violate those laws at taxpayer expense and at no real penalty to anyone involved."

"We're in a state of conflict with the Government. Either we are going to jail or we're going to win."

"The less said about my extended family back in ranch country the better, as I don't want the ATF burning them alive."

"I, for instance, am a jackass, and this anguishes me quite a bit, or at least it would if I were not so fond of being a jackass, which has long been a hobby of mine."

"What an age of innocence it was, the Watergate era... way back in the halcyon days when the US could be contrasted with totalitarian regimes on matters of surveillance."

"I am a tremendous optimist for someone who has grown up amid the twilight of American competence."

"Anyone who dismisses out of hand evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies still do some of the things that they now brag about having done not too long ago is not a skeptic, but a fool."

"Being an atheist is like not owning a TV – completely rational, but best kept to one's self."

"In conclusion, they should let me out of jail."

"Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession."

"In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal."

"You can’t set out to achieve your goals without a little madness."

"Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life, and faith is the oil."

"You can’t walk across a lake just because you change its name to “land.” Labels matter."

"Sometimes we have to “live the question,” not push for the answer."

"To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy."

"We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill."

"In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

"Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!"

"All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give and nothing to fear."

"Ghosh trusted me to do whatever it is I would choose to do. That, too, is love. He'd been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love."

"The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not."

"Roses would be annoying weeds if the blooms never withered and died. Beauty resides in the knowledge that it doesn’t last."

"But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing."

"The ritual of immigration and baggage claim at Kennedy Airport went by so quickly that I wondered if I'd missed it. Where were the armed soldiers? The dogs? The long lines? The body searches? Where were the tables where your luggage was laid open and a knife taken to the lining?"

"I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain."

"The oaks and maples outside the window of his room are wild men with their heads on fire. He shuts his eyes, but the view inside his eyelids is the same nightmare. His nerves are lancinating cables under his skin that send jolts of electricity to his muscles. He is so tremulous that when he brings a glass of water to his lips, he has spilled most of it before he can take a sip. He pukes his insides out, till he imagines the lining of his stomach is smooth and shiny like a copper pot. But the impulse to run is gone. He has put one or perhaps two oceans between him and the place he flees."

"I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?"

"Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!"

"A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth."

"Encouraged by the old surgical saw "Any idiot can amputate a led," Ghosh had decided to proceed. If he hesitated, it was because the rest of the saying went "but it takes a skilled surgeon to save one.""