Non Fiction Authors From The United States

"At the Friends' Meeting House a couple of weeks after Barbara Deming died, we gathered to remember her for one another, to take some comfort and establish her continuity in our bones..."This too," our friend Blue said, and gave me an envelope. In it were shards and stones gathered from the rubble of Vietnamese towns in '67 or '68. On the envelope, these shaky letters were written: "endless love." Nothing personal there, not "with endless love." The words were written waveringly, with a dying hand, on paper that covered bits and pieces of our common remembrance and understanding of another people's great suffering. I thought Barbara was saying, Send those words out, out out into the airy rubbly meaty mortal fact of the world, endless love, the dangerous transforming spirit."

"Prison Notes is the story of two walks undertaken to help change the world without killing it. Barbara Deming was an important member of both. Twenty years of her brave life lie between them. On that first long journey, men and women walked and went to jail together. Women alone took the second shorter walk, and fifty-four were jailed. Barbara was among them. It was her last action, and those who were arrested with her are blessed to have lived beside her strong, informed, and loving spirit for those few days. That difference between the two walks measures a development in movement history and also tells the distance Barbara traveled in those twenty years."

"I had felt for a long time that the two struggles for disarmament and for Negro rights-were properly parts of the one struggle. The same nonviolent tactic joined us, but more than this: our struggles were fundamentally one-to commit our country in act as well as in word to the extraordinary faith announced in our Declaration of Independence: that all men are endowed with certain rights that must not be denied them."

"the issue of war and peace remains fundamentally the issue of whether or not one is going to be willing to respect one’s fellow man."

"the memoirs of poet Elsa Gidlow and civil rights and peace activist Barbara Deming evidenced the struggle with which so many have engaged for a lesbian identity rooted in self-esteem and dignity. In publicly affirming who they were, each encouraged the sense of continuity and tradition central to the formation of lesbian archives. Deming, writing in 1971 to her "dear brother and dear sister," Ray Robinson and Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, southern civil rights activists with whom she had worked in the 1960s, confronted her own oppression as a lesbian and the anger and agony of her feelings of powerlessness: "The bottom I write about of course is the bottom of being a homosexual. Facing always the threat of being despised for that. . . . And as I write this, the tears begin to gush from my eyes, and I know I'm writing the truth of it.""

"This has recently been stressed by Barbara Deming in her plea for nonviolent action-"On Revolution and Equilibrium," in Revolution: Violent and Nonviolent, reprinted from Liberation, February, 1968. She says about Fanon, on p. 3: "It is my conviction that he can be quoted as well to plead for nonviolence.... Every time you find the word 'violence' in his pages, substitute for it the phrase 'radical and uncompromising action.' I contend that with the exception of a very few passages this substitution can be made, and that the action he calls for could just as well be nonviolent action." Even more important for my purposes: Miss Deming also tries to distinguish clearly between power and violence, and she recognizes that "nonviolent disruption" means "to exert force.... It resorts even to what can only be called physical force" (p. 6). However, she curiously underestimates the effect of this force of disruption, which stops short only of physical injury, when she says, "the human rights of the adversary are respected" (p. 7). Only the opponent's right to life, but none of the other human rights, is actually respected. The same is of course true for those who advocate "violence against things" as opposed to "violence against persons.""

"By way of conclusion: facility is not enough. Blood and sweat—yes, and tears as well—are the secret of the thing."

"In 1967, she spoke of “the need to become more bold, and therefore more effective” and that would bring more government repression. “And then if we do not all stand together, helping always whomever is singled out for punishment, our effectiveness will end… We must certainly be frank with each other when we disagree,” she told War Resisters League. “We will need every one of us. We are all part of one another.”"

"Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restraints have all failed. The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent."

"It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse."

"Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted for very long. However cunning they were in their rise, once in power they were surprisingly incompetent. Possessing no vision for the country they ruled, they were incapable of fashioning enduring support, and though they were cruel and violent, they could never crush all of the opposition. Their isolation, suspicion, and anger, often conjoined to an arrogant overconfidence, hastened their downfall. The plays that depict tyranny inevitably end at least with gestures toward the renewal of community and the restoration of legitimate order."

"Things change profoundly in the church after Luther. The church becomes much more embattled. It makes some attempts at internal reform. But it also makes very vigorous attempts to silence dissent. With some exceptions — I’m no historian of the Catholic church — but it seems to me that the church has never entirely, as it were, come out from the other side on the Council of Trent. It’s not an accident that the current Pope was the head of the [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], the ideological wing of the church [that led the inquisition]."

"Ever since I was quite young I’ve been fascinated by the idea that something would hit you — not just that you would find something, but that something would find you."

"As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare’s penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge truth—to possess it fully and not perish of it—through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance."

"Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable. But he sees that they can be made to further his ambitions."

"Politicians are always invoking providence. Politicians are forced in America to behave as the political equivalent of those baseball players who hit home runs and run around, waving their hands up to heaven as if God was actually worrying about whether they were going to hit a home run or not, helping one team rather than the other! It’s a fantastic idea, but it’s somehow part of our popular culture and our politicians pay lip service to the same notion."

"Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of the people who steadfastly remained silent when they were exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant, or the servant who tried to stop his vicious master from torturing a prisoner, or the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. "What is the city but the people?""

"Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity."

"What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism."

"The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life."

"The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear."

"There was a time in the ancient world—a very long time—in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one’s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being."

"The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent."

"The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things."

"Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested. But it can be intuited easily enough when you look in Siena at Duccio’s painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maestà, and then in Florence at Botticelli’s Primavera."

"A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure—an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation—characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet."

"The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul."

"Poggio Bracciolini was a book hunter, perhaps the greatest in an age obsessed with ferreting out and recovering the heritage of the ancient world. The finding of a lost book does not ordinarily figure as a thrilling event, but behind that one moment was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan antiquity. The act of discovery fulfilled the life’s passion of a brilliant book hunter. And that book hunter, without ever intending or realizing it, became a midwife to modernity."

"Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld."

"Allusions to "hidden counsels" and "mysterious reasons" are almost always the mark of doctrinal incoherence."

"In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the animals. In Genesis the clay human is created "in the image of God" and has from the beginning the status of one who is not a companion to the other animals but of one who dominates them."

"Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin."

"He saw in Falstaff...a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted."

"This was the crucial moment in the development of the English language, the moment in which the deepest things, the things upon which the fate of the soul depended, were put into ordinary, familiar, everyday words. Two men above all others, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer, rose to the task. Without them, without the great English translation of the New Testament and the sonorous, deeply resonant Book of Common Prayer, it is difficult to imagine William Shakespeare."

"I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read."

"Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life."

"On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world."

"Act as though it is impossible to fail"

"“I don’t think Roger…was particularly religious in a Bible, church way,” says Lasley. “His religion was life. Nature.”"

"DDT anywhere is DDT everywhere."

"This whole business of the slaughter of…birds…for their plumes for millinery purposes is one that every lover of nature and every person of humane feeling who understands the case will regard no less than infamous. This is one of the moral questions—to be classed with the opium traffic and the slave trade—to which there is but one side. In these days there is arising a many-sided and tremendous problem in regard to saving the natural world from ignorant, short-sighted, commercial vandalism. Every tree must be cut down, every plant pulled up, every wild thing slaughtered, every beautiful scene disfigured, if only there is money to be made from it."

"“Now celebrities are not ordinary people,” says Clement. “The world treats them differently and, therefore, they react differently.”"

"“I had always thought that accidents happened to other people. From now on I will fasten my seat belt,” he (Roger Tory Peterson) said."

"Freedom for women to be what they want to be will help complete the circle of freedom America has been striving for 200 years."

"As the barriers against freedom for Americans because of race or religion have fallen, the freedom of all has expanded. The search for human freedom can never be complete without freedom of women."

"I feel absolutely marvelous. I just had my annual checkup and all my tests are completely clear. There is no sign whatsoever of a cancerous reoccurrence at this point. I am convinced that I am completely cured."

"The most difficult moments were trying to pull my family through my cancer operation. I really had to pull them through, and to try to make them happy because they were so sad and upset."

"Too many women are so afraid of breast cancer that they endanger their lives. These fears of being "less" of a woman are very real, and it is very important to talk about the emotional side effects honestly. They must come out into the open. It was easier for me to accept the operation, because I had been married for 26 years and we had four children. There was no problem of lack of love, affection, and attention. But some women don't have these same emotional resources, and it is very necessary to deal realistically with the fears about breast cancer."

"We invent systems, Socialism, Fascism, Communism and Capitalism. Each despises the other. Yet, as Professor Aldo Leopold of the University of Wisconsin pointed out, they all espouse one creed: salvation by machinery. Is it any wonder that when these systems prove faulty and men detect the synthetic nature of the civilization of their devising they turn to nature? In a world that seems to have gone mad is it any wonder birds have such appeal? Birds are, perhaps, the most eloquent expression of reality."

"Change, by its very nature, is threatening but it is also often productive. And the fight of women to become more productive, accepted human beings is important to all people of either sex and nationality."