Activists From The United States

"Art has a deep responsibility, social, cultural, and otherwise. And that the basic motivation for the creation of art is, in a sense, to meet those responsibilities. Now, it doesn't mean that you cannot express yourself in any way you want to, but it takes place in a social context, whether you mean it to do so or not"

"I have less opportunities than I used to, but I don't think there's any prejudice against me because of my age"

"I fully expected that a black man particularly would by lynched from time to time because it was going on when I came into the world"

"Colorblind casting shouldn't violate common sense"

"when the time comes we'll give each other our own Oscar and attend our own funerals and screw the rest of it if necessary"

"Criticism used to be an art practiced by educated people. Now you don't know what any of them are looking for in anything"

"It was a tradition that had gone all the way back into slavery, as long as we knew ourselves, we knew this as a part of the world in which we lived. We related to it on an individual basis, as it happened, we related to the incidents."

"Optimism is small and personal"

"The struggle and the arts are connected almost by definition"

"One of the traps we've tried to avoid is the presentation of ourselves as victims or beggars"

"We knew that if we lived within those parameters there was a world, that was really to some degree a safe world, and a world that provided us, reaffirmed us as to whom we were because it was a black world"

"We have freedom. What we don't have is equality!"

"They knew what to say because it fell into the existing rhetoric"

"There is a lot of American history waiting to be rediscovered, once you get away from the official version"

"But there were limits of the power that the black community had. It could not punish those from the outside who wrought crime against us, it could not demand that justice be done, it could beg, it could pray, you know, it could cajole, it could wheedle, you know, but it could never insist, and we knew that that was a limit"

"Mankind, humankind is at stake"

"I had a sense of certainty that no matter how dark it is now, one of these days it'll change."

"Performing artists are less political today than they were years ago because they're not called on to be political"

"We're going somewhere, even if it's only around the Goddamn corner"

"And also I love the idea of codes. I love secrets, trading secrets. I love the act of encoding, I love the space where you don’t know what the code means, and I love the act of decoding and the moment of understanding."

"I often most often work in ways that are designed to reach as many people as possible. To me that’s sort of a basic question for every artist, “Who are you making artwork for?” If you’re just making it for yourself, that’s cool, no need to show anyone else."

"I love QR codes. They are just an amazingly powerful and also often completely useless system for sharing digital information and artwork, through these weird little abstract, physical black-and-white designs. I also love that most people just have no idea what to do with them."

"I’m making artwork for other people to experience, so I work in ways like public street art, public web sites, social media, digital printmaking, artists books and zines, mass media, video and audio files, many different ways that can be easily distributed and reach wide audiences and create and take part in larger conversations."

"What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement, where violence is not an option."

"I'm sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, "Boy, I hope he's qualified.""

"Democrats have given hundreds of billions of dollars to illegals and foreign nations, while Gen Z has to pinch pennies just so that they can never own a home, never marry, and work until they die, childless."

"I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it. We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s."

"You don't have to stay poor. You don't have to accept being worse off than your parents. You don't have to feel aimless and unhappy. You don't have to support leaders who lied to you and took advantage of you for your vote. America's future is a series of choices."

"I am here tonight to tell you, to warn you, that this election is a decision between preserving America as we know it and eliminating everything that we love."

"America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave."

"The one issue that I think is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God is the transgender thing happening in America."

"Prove me wrong"

"Never give up, never surrender, and always go for the win."

"Change my mind."

"Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years. […] Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the West, there will not be a safe future. I'm not going to say Israel won't exist, but Israel will be in jeopardy as long as the Western children, children of the West, are being taught, with primarily Jewish dollars, subsidizing it, to view everything through oppressor-oppressed dynamic."

"I can't stand the word 'empathy' actually. I think 'empathy' is a made-up, New Age term that—it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy."

"I believe marriage is one man one woman Also gay people should not welcome in the conservative movement As Christians we are called to love everyone I will always stand against people who wish to establish their own personal values as a reason to kick others out of our movement"

"It's a strange tweet that Elon pinpointed on here. But the first part is absolutely true. Let's go to this. "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them." Now, I don't like generalizations. Not every Jewish person believes that, but it is true that the Anti-Defamation League was part and parcel with Black Lives Matter. It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-White causes have been Jewish Americans. They went all in on woke. And it wasn't just ADL, it was some of the top Jewish organizations in the country that have done that."

""Oh, MLK's a great guy." Actually MLK was awful. OK? He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe."

"Joe Biden is bumbling, dementia-filled, Alzheimer's, corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America."

"And it says, by the way, , — might want to crack open that Bible of yours — in a lesser referenced part of the same part of Scripture, is in Leviticus 18, is that "Thou shall lay with another man, shall be stoned to death." Just sayin'. So, Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, "Love your neighbor as yourself". The chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matter."

"I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational."

"That Kirk did not explicitly advocate for the stoning of gays to death, in the strictest sense and syntax of those words, is therefore a distinction without a difference – unless, like Kirk, you’re a liar. In that case, the distinction between saying what you’re saying and not saying what you’re saying is important. If that collapses, so does your deception. As long as the distinction between what is said and what is intended to be understood is in place, it’s possible to bully people into silence. That’s what happened to Stephen King and others. They spoke the truth about Kirk – not the strict letter of it but the true spirit of it – but did not have the courage to stand by the truth after being accused of slander. And in the process of apologizing, they ended up affirming the lie, making it grow bigger, such that a USA Today story about King’s apology says that he “repeatedly apologized for a false accusation.” (After all, it must have been false if Stephen King apologized for it.)"

"The five-hour memorial service for conservative activist/influencer/organizer Charlie Kirk that packed tens of thousands Sunday into a Phoenix-area stadium was a melding of religion and politics unlike any seen before. Or perhaps it was proof, if any more were needed, that the line that used to separate them may no longer exist, particularly on the right. Practically missing were the healing rituals the nation has come to know in these times when it is rocked by the all-too-common kind of tragedy that occurred when Kirk was killed Sept. 10 on a college campus in Utah. With the exception of a moving and powerful declaration by his widow, Erika Kirk, that her Christian faith calls her to forgive her husband’s killer, there were almost no appeals for transcending the political divide or putting hate aside. Or recognition that the spasm of political violence of recent years has been the work of — and inflicted upon — both of the nation’s ideological tribes, arising in an era in which deranged individuals find in the fetid corners of online culture justification for horrendous acts. All of this formed an emblem of where the country finds itself in the Trump era. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” the president, who was the final speaker, said of Kirk. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”"

"The boisterous partisan rhetoric during the funeral of Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota), who died in a plane crash before the 2002 elections, provoked a backlash that became known as the “Wellstone effect” and was a factor in the subsequent defeat of his replacement on the ballot, former vice president Walter Mondale. There were political overtones to the 2018 memorial service for Sen. John McCain (R), whose war heroism Trump had disparaged and whose service also took place in Arizona. But eulogist Joe Biden, then a former vice president, lamented: “All we do today is attack the oppositions of both parties, their motives, not the substance of their argument.” Since then, that divide has only deepened. As the memorial for Kirk so vividly demonstrated, the growing imperative for the movement that Trump started and Kirk helped elevate is not to bridge, but to conquer."

"Kirk’s stature has become even larger in death than it was when he was a living political phenomenon."

"You don't have to say nice things about Charlie Kirk just because he’s dead. You can condemn political violence in all its forms – and you should. You can wish his family well. You can express your sincere condolences to all families of all victims of all political violence. You can even overlook, if you believe it’s worth it, the fact that he spent nearly all of his young adult life selling for profit the hatred of racial and sexual minorities, liberalism and the Democrats generally. You can choose to do these things in full confidence that you have lived up to your obligation as a decent human being. But otherwise, you don’t have to say nice things in order to prove to someone – whoever that is – that you are not glad he’s dead. You don’t have to prove anything."

"Generally though Kirk was loyal to Trump, whom he saw as key to establishing the conservative Christian America he wanted to help realize, one in which abortion is heavily restricted to cases of medical emergency in which the mother’s life cannot be saved by any other means, women enter higher education to find husbands and “woke” ideologies play no part in public life. Donald Trump Jr., a friend with whom he visited Greenland in January, said the MAGA movement will deeply miss Charlie Kirk as one of its most influential young voices."

"It would be appropriate to suggest that Kirk could be a victim of the kind of politics that he sold, just as it was appropriate to suggest that the Marlboro Men were victims of the kind of products that they sold. (All five men died of smoking-related diseases). Kirk embraced political violence as a “remedy.” He bussed his followers to the J6 insurrection. He once said: “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.” It is in no way an endorsement of political violence to suggest that Kirk saw the consequences of his choices, just as it was not an endorsement of, say, lung cancer to suggest that the Marlboro Men saw the consequences of theirs. In 2023, Kirk famously said annual gun deaths are a “rational” price for our society to pay in exchange for its liberties. “We should not have a utopian view [of gun violence],” he said. “We will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. That’s drivel. But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” So it’s not only appropriate to suggest that Charlie Kirk died by the sword that he lived by, it’s deeply moral, as it affirms the belief that no one but the individual can be held responsible for the choices of that individual. (The shooter, it should go without saying, will be held responsible for his.) I would even say it’s deeply conservative to say so."

"The Turning Point founder was addressing the subject of gun violence when he was fatally shot in Utah. Kirk was known to be a gun owner himself and regularly spoke out on the issue, including on behalf of the National Rifle Association in the aftermath of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018. At a Turning Point event in Salt Lake City in April 2023, he said, “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”"