Activists From The United States

"These beltway elitists, these limousine liberals here in New York, don’t live in the real world and Blacks have to, and browns have to deal with the real world every day, and we don’t sit in crowded subways reading left-wing or right-wing propaganda."

"If Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house."

"I'll know how outraged I am when I know how many black people were on those flights."

"Sharpton helped stoke the Jew-hatred that sparked black anti-Jewish riots in 1991. In a book published in 2006, Edward S. Shapiro, a Brandeis University historian, described the riot as "the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.""

"Sharpton also runs a phony civil rights organization called the National Action Network, which has collected many millions of dollars from corporations in what essentially amounts to an extortion racket that enables those corporations to buy racial peace."

"Among the many nonhumane activities Sharpton has been involved in was the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he fabricated a charge that four white men had raped a young black woman named Tawana Brawley."

"This is the beginning of the twenty-first century's civil rights movement," Reverend Sharpton told the throng. "In the twentieth century, we had to fight for where we sat on the bus. Now, we've gotta fight on how we sit in a courtroom. We've gone from plantations to penitentiaries, where they have tried to create a criminal justice system that particularly targets our young black men."...Reverend Sharpton concluded at the civil rights rally, "Martin Luther King, Jr., and others faced Jim Crow. We come to Jena to face James Crow, Jr., Esquire. He's a little more educated. A little more polished. But it's the same courthouse steps used to beat down our people. And just like our daddies beat Jim Crow, we will win the victory over James Crow, Jr."

"Sharpton preaches like a man who has been doing it since before he could read or write. (He was only four when he gave his first sermon on John 14 in front of nine hundred people at the Washington Temple Church of God in Christ in Brooklyn.) His sermons are as extemporaneous as his schedule. Not a word is written down; everything is subject to change. Often he switches the topic of a sermon midway through in response to what he feels from the crowd. Sometimes he bursts into song. Most surprising of all, there’s a fair amount of religion in Sharpton’s preaching. He quotes at length from the Bible, talks without embarrassment about Jesus and redemption and heaven and hell. He believes in the supernatural and says so. He’s probably the only Democratic presidential candidate this year who is comfortable discussing faith healing, prophesies, and speaking in tongues, all of which he has seen and is convinced are real."

"As a rule, the civil rights establishment is not punctual. But even by the standards of the chronically late, Sharpton is chronically late. Like all politicians, he tends to schedule an impossible number of events in a single day. But that’s only part of the problem. Habit accounts for the rest. After spending so many years on the road, with so little cash, so far from the edge of respectability, Sharpton has lost the ability to travel like a legitimate person. In Sharpton’s world, itineraries are merely suggestions. It’s a measure of his awesome natural talent that he’s able to get anything done at all. He’s that disorganized. One of the few commitments that Sharpton never misses is church on Sunday. He attends a service no matter where he happens to be. If you know Sharpton primarily through his political activism—or his history as a Tawana Brawley adviser or FBI informant or James Brown protégé—it can be hard to believe that he’s actually a Christian clergyman. Doubts disappear when you hear him preach."

"MSNBC continues to prominently feature the Reverend Al Sharpton. He was Jussie Smollett before Jussie Smollett was in the matter of the Tawana Brawley hate-crime/rape hoax, and his rabble-rousing attacks on Jewish “bloodsuckers” and “interlopers” preceded the mass murder at Freddie’s Fashion Mart. He inflamed anti-Semitic passions leading up to the Crown Heights riots. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes apparently are content to be affiliated with him."

"Ed Schultz, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes provided us with the very fair coverage we received on MSNBC."

"They tried to say that being gay is a sin, and I said that adultery is a sin. Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It’s absurd."

"We don’t want to be manipulated by right-wing elitist billionaires or by left-wing guys that don’t understand our life on the ground that is living in fear of crime, that is living as a result of inflation that is killing us in many parts of the country. We need gas to go to work."

"They’re losing people of color because they really don’t get the people of color’s life. If you are living in a city, in a neighborhood, that is inundated with crime, and you act like that’s not an issue you've already lost me. That is an issue. You cannot ignore when a 12-year-old kid who is somebody’s niece and neighbor is killed, and you act like that's a nonissue because you're too elitist to live on the ground."

"I suggest to you tonight that if George Bush had selected the [Supreme] court in '54, Clarence Thomas would have never got to law school."

"But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody."

"Mr. President, you said would we have more leverage if both parties got our votes, but we didn't come this far playing political games. It was those that earned our vote that got our vote. We got the Civil Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the Voting Rights Act under a Democrat. We got the right to organize under Democrats. Mr. President, the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn't gained because of our age. Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of good men, soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham. This vote is sacred to us. This vote can't be bargained away. This vote can't be given away. Mr. President, in all due respect, Mr. President, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale."

"Mr. President, as I close, Mr. President, I heard you say Friday that you had questions for voters, particularly African- American voters. And you asked the question: Did the Democratic Party take us for granted? Well, I have raised questions. But let me answer your question. You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us."

"I want his children to know: wasn't anything strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with."

"I'm projected as an ambulance chaser, but I'm more the ambulance. People call me because they know I will come.… I have never fought a case where they didn't ask me to come. People have this picture like I'm sitting up in bed at night with a walkie-talkie. "You hear anything? Oh, let's run! It's Virginia today!"… Every victim calls us.… "Who put Sharpton in charge?" The victim!"

"I disagreed with the grand jury on [Tawana] Brawley. I believed there was enough evidence to go to trial. The grand jury said there wasn’t. OK, fine. Do I have a right to disagree with the grand jury? Many Americans believe O.J. Simpson was guilty. A jury said he wasn’t. So I have as much right to question a jury as they do. Does it make somebody a racist? No! They just disagreed with the jury. So did I."

"Jim Crow is old. That's not who I'm mindful of today. The problem is that Jim Crow has sons. The one we've got to battle is James Crow Jr., Esq. He's a little more educated. He's a little slicker. He's a little more polished, but the results are the same."

"Clearly, [President Bush] lied. Now if he is an unconscious liar, and doesn't realize when he's lying, then we're really in trouble."

"Now that they have achieved the capture of Hussein, they should appeal to the UN to come in with a multilateral redevelopment plan. This is all the more reason this war should come to an immediate end."

"Who defines terrorists? Today's terrorist is tomorrow's friend. We were the ones that worked with Saddam Hussein. The United States worked with bin Laden."

"I do believe the [[Democratic Party (United States)|[Democratic] party]] has moved far to the right. I do believe that the party has a bunch of elephants running around in donkey clothes."

"Tawana Brawley told her story many months before I got involved—and many others got involved, Bill Cosby, and many others, who have never refuted the story. I don't refute it now. I believe … something happened to Tawana Brawley.… There is a problem in this country, that a lot of people don’t believe women. A lot of people don’t believe young women. I took the risk, as I have in most of the civil rights cases I have fought, to stand up for the victim. In this particular case, a jury did not believe her."

"I have no problem with Khalid Abdul Muhammad. My problem is with Giuliani. It is not Khalid who is talking hate. It's Rudy Giuliani."

"When he said he was going to stop the march and called it a hate march, I think that was very provocative. The Mayor's statements have created a climate that could possibly lead to some kind of confrontation."

"I disagree with [[Khalid Abdul Muhammad|[Khalid Abdul] Muhammad]]. I'm against hate, anti-Semitism and homophobia.… This is not a village of hate. It's a village of hope.… Don't let midgets give us a bad name. There are still giants in Harlem giants who will stand up for our children."

"Crime is going down everywhere but in the New York City Police Department."

"Though there were over 200 policemen standing around, none of them made a move to grab him."

"What’s wrong with denouncing white interlopers?"

"There is a systemic and methodical strategy to eliminate our people from doing business off 125th Street. I want to make it clear … that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business."

"We built pyramids before Donald Trump even knew what architecture was. We taught philosophy and astrology [sic] and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it…Do some cracker come and tell you, ‘Well my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold your pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of, that means their forefathers was crooks."

"Mark Miller is my brother and I love him dearly."

"The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one's outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?"

"The people of England are about finished with him. Americans are beginning to feel the same way, and the halo of hero worship around Lindbergh's head is getting pretty well tarnished."

"No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon. How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint! But then what could I know in 1960 of 1963 or 1968 or 1974 or 2001 or 2016? ... However prescient The Plot Against America might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U.S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It's the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. ... Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac."

"Charles was a stubborn Swede, you know, and he himself never felt the need to explain his feelings about where he stood and about past statements. But I feel free now to elaborate on his actual attitudes. He never wanted to be regarded as a hero or leader, and he never had political ambitions. His prewar isolationist speeches were given in all sincerity for what he thought was the good of the country and the world. ... He was accused of being anti-Semetic, but in the 45 years I lived with him I never heard him make a remark against the Jews, not a crack or joke, and neither did any of our children."

"Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in."

"In fact a de facto state of war between Germany and the United States had existed since September 11, 1941, when Roosevelt had authorized American naval commanders who encountered German vessels to fire at them 'on sight'. This was possible because the tide of American public opinion had been running against the Axis powers, despite the best efforts of isolationists like Senator Hiram W. Johnson, neutralists like the lawyer and legal historian Charles Warren and crypto-fascists like the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Ordinary Americans did not want war. Many believed they had been duped into the last war by the machinations of British imperialists and North-Eastern business interests. They were strongly attracted to the neutralists' idea that by prohibiting military supplies or loans to combatant countries Congress could avoid another such entanglement. But they supported American rearmament from as early as 193 6. They clearly favoured Britain over Germany from 1938 onwards. Above all, Americans did not want to see an Axis victory - and by September 1939 a majority of voters saw that this was best insured against by supplying arms and material to Britain. The German victories of 1940 caused that view to spread. There was public support, too, for the sanctions imposed on Japan which set the course for Pearl Harbor."

"On August 30, Lindbergh visited Tarawa, recalled the terrible casualties there, and told of a naval officer who lined up the few Japanese captured, kept those who could speak English for questioning, and had the rest killed. In early September, he noted that on some islands Marines actually dug up dead bodies in their search for gold teeth. Elsewhere they collected noses as well as ears, teeth, and skulls. When Lindbergh finally left the Pacific islands and cleared customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any bones in his baggage. It was, he was told, a routine question."

"On May 18, 1944, about two weeks after Lindbergh had tied in with a Marine unit, he recorded that the camps were full of reports of Japanese torture and the beheading of captured American pilots. A month later, on June 21, he summarized the conversation of an American general who told how an unsuspecting Japanese prisoner was given a cigarette and then seized from behind and had his throat "slit from ear to ear" as a demonstration of how to kill Japanese. Lindbergh's objections were met with tolerant scorn and pity."

"No source, however, captures the war hates and war crimes of this merciless struggle more soberly than Charles Lindbergh's diary. For over four months in mid-1944, Lindbergh lived and flew as a civilian observer with U.S. forces based in New Guinea, and as the weeks passed he became deeply troubled, not by the willingness to kill on the part of the soldiers, which he accepted as an inherent part of the war, but by the utter contempt in which Allied fighting men held their Japanese adversaries. The famous "Lone Eagle," whose isolationist sentiments had placed him among the conservative opponents of President Roosevelt's policies, really hearkened back to what [J. Glenn Gray] has called the more chivalrous tradition of the professional militarist, who accepts the necessity of war while maintaining respect for his adversaries, recognizing courage as courage and duty as duty, irrespective of the uniform worn. Lindbergh found no such sentiments among the Allied forces in the Pacific, where officers and enlisted men alike saw the enemy simply as animals and "yellow sons of bitches," and his detailed journal may be the most forthright firsthand account available of the "other" side of the Pacific War."

"Lindbergh believed all the elements of the earth and heavens are connected, through space and time. The configurations of molecules in each moment help create the next. Thus he considered his defining moment just another step in the development of aviation and exploration — a summit built on all those that preceded it and a springboard to all those that would follow. Only by looking back, Lindbergh believed, could mankind move forward. "In some future incarnation from our life stream," he wrote in later years, "we may understand the reason for our existence in forms of earthly life.""

"As the first American airman to exhibit "the right stuff," Lindbergh inspired his country's first astronauts by sheer example. But more than that, he was — unknown to the public — the man most responsible for securing the funding that underwrote the research of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, the inventor of the modern rocket. A friend of the first man to fly an airplane, Lindbergh lived long enough in a fast-moving world to befriend the first man to walk on the moon."

"Lindbergh's arrival in Paris became the defining moment of his life, that event on which all his future actions hinged — as though they were but a predestined series of equal but opposite reactions, fraught with irony... In the spring of 1927, Lindbergh had been too consumed by what he called "the single objective of landing my plane at Paris" to have considered its aftermath. "To plan beyond that had seemed an act of arrogance I could not afford," he would later write. Even if he had thought farther ahead, however, he could never have predicted the unprecedented global response to his arrival. By that year, radio, telephones, radiographs, and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds. What was more, motion pictures had just mastered the synchronization of sound, allowing dramatic moments to be preserved in all their glory and distributed worldwide. For the first time all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event — almost instantaneously and simultaneously. And in this unusually good-looking, young aviator — of apparently impeccable character — the new technology found its first superstar. The reception in Paris was only a harbinger of the unprecedented worship people would pay Lindbergh for years. Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human endeavor, and that he was, after all, only a man. The public saw more than that... Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth."

"I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux. I extend a multiple of ways in experience in space. I am myself now, lying on my back in the jungle grass, passing through the ether between satellites and stars. My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars."

"I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? ... As one identity, I was born in AD 1902. But as AD twentieth-century man, I am billions of years old. The life I consider as myself has existed though past eons with unbroken continuity. Individuals are custodians of the life stream — temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams. ... I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that the life stream is like a mountain river — springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen. It is molecules probing through time, found smooth-flowing, adjusted to shaped and shaping banks, roiled by rocks and tree trunks — composed again. Now it ends, apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall. Near the fall's brink, I saw death as death cannot be seen. I stared at the very end of life, and at life that forms beyond, at the fact of immortality. Dark water bent, broke, disintegrated, transformed to apparition — a tall, stately ghost soul emerged from body, and the finite individuality of the whole becomes the infinite individuality of particles. Mist drifted, disappeared in air, a vanishing of spirit. Far below in the valley, I saw another river, reincarnated from the first, its particles reorganized to form a second body. It carried the same name. It was similar in appearance. It also ended at a lava brink. Flow followed fall, and fall followed flow as I descended the mountainside. The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming."