Sociologists From The United States

"He admitted killing Officer John Frey. He said that before he killed Frey, the police and the power structure could just come down to the black community and do anything they wanted. But after he shot Frey, much of that changed."

"My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community."

"Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonialists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese—any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force—are suicidal."

"The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact."

"I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism."

"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life."

"Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death."

"I do not think life will change for the better without an assault on the establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions."

"To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner."

"You can kill my body, but you can't kill my soul. My soul will live forever!"

"When you deal with a man, deal with his most valuable possession, his life. There's play and there's the deep flow. I like to take things to the deep flow of play, because everything is a game, serious and nonserious at the same time. So play life like it's a game."

"My foes have called me bum, hoodlum, criminal. Some have even called me nigger. I imagine now they'll at least have to call me Dr. Nigger."

"To die for the racists is lighter than a feather, but to die for the people is heavier than any mountain and deeper than any sea."

"An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment."

"Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence."

"We must ally ourselves with the oppressed communities of the world. We cannot make our stand as nationalists, we cannot even make our stand as internationalists. We must place our future hopes upon the philosophy of intercommunalism, a philosophy which holds that the rise of imperialism in America transforms all other nations into oppressed communities. In revolutionary love we must make common cause with these oppressed communities."

"In their quest for freedom and in their attempts to prevent the oppressor from striping them of all the things they need to exist, the people see things as moving from A to B to C; they do not see things as moving from A to Z."

"We realized at a very early point in our development that revolution is a process. It is not a particular action, nor is it a conclusion. It is a process."

"Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something he does not have."

"The blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind."

"When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun."

"The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people."

"Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreements about this function of law in any circle-the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to construct rules and laws that serve their interest better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation."

"I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness."

"The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing."

"Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."

"However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home."

"While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests."

"Man lives in a paradoxical world where his human development is hamstrung by the fact that the only kind of free scientific inquiry he does not allow himself is the pursuit of human truth, and the only kind of audacity in engineering enterprise which is alien to his nature is the undertaking of moral intervention in the lives of others."

"The hostility of society toward homosexuality is only a special case of its general hostility toward the adolescent spirit. In order to undermine the creative efforts of individuals to shape their lives by their own standards of human understanding and morality, society identifies their deviancy in terms of its inadequacies and failures, thereby undermining their access to basic social acceptance in adaptive areas."

"Life is each human being's workshop. If a man survives a lifetime with his creative capacities intact, he has done his part to make a better world for all men."

"Because psychoanalysis emerged as a medical specialty concerned with the healing of the sick, it focused its attention on the pathological processes arising from the disruption of the adaptive capacities, and this subject matter was taken to be the totality of significant information concerning the structure of the personality. The diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is, however, a poor basis for the empiricism which a basic science requires. Mental illness, when it is seen in terms of the symptoms and syndromes which come to the attention of the psychotherapist, presents a picture of the personality which is readily fragmented and distorted out of proportion."

"As long as psychotherapy concerns itself with the relief of psychic distress, avoiding the larger questions which arise from involvement with the creative process, it can perform its medical healing function without doing major violence to the social assets which creativity supplies."

"The Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve dwelt was only an illusion. Before men accumulated sexual shame and celebrative guilt they lacked that character differentiation out of which the human soul takes its being. Their world was a garden only in the sense that the jungle is a garden to its animal inhabitants. Man means something different when he speaks of a garden, or an El Dorado, or a paradise for the human spirit. Man means a world of eternal springtime in the human heart, where faith never fails and hope never falters, where men always understand more today than they did yesterday, and establish an always broadening responsibility in the world. He means a world of lasting contentment, where the contentment of today passes that of yesterday, and a world of complete happiness where today's happiness is bigger than that of the day before. He means a world of love which fears nothing that the human eye can see, and a world of power which cannot be touched by rage in the performance of any act. When he sees these things he is not dreaming, and when he reaches for them he is not play acting. He is only sounding the battle horn and raising the banner by which he lays claim to ownership of the world, acting in his own name."

"The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world."

"Man is the animal with a soul who thinks and builds; his penetrating insights into the laws of nature are there for any child to learn, and his impressive mastery of the materials of the earth stands ready to be imitated by anyone, but the home he has built for his own kind is still a lonely and impoverished place for many people. There is nothing about that loneliness that wisdom cannot change; there is nothing in that poverty that strength cannot overcome. Separated from each other, the thinker is a stranger in his own house, and the builder is a beggar at his own door. Together, they can bring the warmth of love and the helpfulness of power into the daily market place of living, taking a human position that is eternal and without compromise. In the midst of the obvious and the commonplace, and only in this birthplace of human contentment and happiness, the thinker and builder can leave the monastic cell and relinquish barracks mobility to claim the world in the name of human beings. When they do so, man can expect a human harvest equal to his dreams, and measured to the nobility of his posture."

"In psychotherapy, the impact of love feelings, technically called the transference, is held under some degree of control by the artificial device of interpreting the patient's feelings while establishing barriers to the psychological exposure of the therapist. The therapist is supposed to come to the relationship fully endowed with a stable set of established insights which will be adequate in a practical sense to any application which the patient's needs will require. The patient, on the other hand, is supposed to limit his interaction with the therapist to the areas where he is aware of psychic pain or where the therapist accepts communication in the name of therapeutic technique. If everything else is carefully excluded, neither participant will be called on to deal with areas of the unknown in themselves which would require creative personal investment."

"We were in a terrible situation... Banks were closing. The economic life of the country was almost at a standstill."

"[S]he had that burdensome conscience that drove her to get something done that probably made the most significant difference in the life of America than almost anything that you can name."

"[I]nto this enormous churning, seemingly endless insecure society, they introduced the notion of a secure society, social security. I do not believe that the Social Security Act would have made it into law without Francis Perkins."

"There is no contribution that a cabinet member has made in the history of this country that has had the lasting kind of effect on all of us, and the way we live, than what Francis Perkins did."

"Frances Perkins tried to... speak to a level of discontent... unhappiness... misery... [S]he was... unusually committed, unusually brave, alone in a world of men, moving into a sphere that no woman had ever moved into before. ...for all that we owe her a good deal of thanks."

"Prior to the creation of Social Security only 1 out of every 100 Americans had any provision at all for retirement. Their bodies worn out, in poverty and misery, many of them were shipped to... the poor farm, warehouses of death where most of the elderly went to live and to die. Poverty is tough, misery is difficult, pain and suffering are hard, but nothing equals the loss of self-esteem in a person's life, and Frances Perkins changed that."

"She was able to help weave the torn fabric of a failing democracy into a new design for government that would change life for every single American."

"During her 12 years as Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins suffered public insults, attacks on her manner and dress, lies about her birth place and ethnicity, death threats, and finally an unsuccessful impeachment attempt. Through it all she worked 15 hour days to shorten work hours for others. She crusaded for the poor and homeless, even as her own home was broken by disease and separation."

"She inherited part of a tradition of service. She was its caretaker for a little while, and she passed it on to another generation. ...[T]here was a timelessness and a transcendence to the quality of her work, just a natural part of the American society..."

"Perkins was... right in knowing that the fight to maintain labor standards would be ongoing. As recently as 1991, twenty-five workers died in a factory fire in Raleigh, North Carolina. They were trapped behind locked doors and blocked fire escapes. ...Nor would she be surprised to know that unemployment and healthcare are still problems. ...But she trusted that there would be another generation... who believed in social justice and who would fight to make life better for all Americans."

"Sadly, Perkins was right that the door might not open to other women for a "long, long time." Twenty years passed before... Dwight Eisenhower, appointed... ... as secretary of health, education and welfare... Forty-two years passed before President Gerald Ford appointed Carla Hills as secretary of housing and urban development... Sixty years later President Bill Clinton appointed three women and eleven men to his cabinet."

"Frances Perkins's name and the dates of her birth and death are carved on her headstone. So are the words:Secretary of Labor of U.S.A. 1933-1945"

"[Upon accepting] Truman's appointment [to the] three-member Civil Service Commission (CSC)... For six and a half years Perkins prodded the government to be more efficient, to cut down on red tape and to simplify rules and regulations."