Journalists From The United States

"These two teachings once held secret, or openly promulgated in a more or less imperfect form, are examples of the manner in which from age to age when the need arises for so doing, esoteric teachings are openly developed by the Brotherhood of sages and seers. Such teachings profoundly modify civilization because they profoundly change human psychology and the spiritual and intellectual vision of mankind. (Chapter 2)"

"Few people realize the enormous but always invisible and quiet psychological leverage that new ideas have upon human consciousness; and this is especially so with teachings of a spiritual or intellectual type. All these teachings are replete with the divine conceptions of the gods who first gave Truth to men; and this is the secret of the immense sway that Religion per se (apart from mere degenerate religions) has upon human intellect. (Chapter 2)"

"Our own globe earth, in fact is technically a "hell" because it is a relatively dense material sphere and the states of consciousness of the beings inhabiting it are relatively heavily involved in the webs of maya — illusion. For this reason H. P. Blavatsky in The Voice of the Silence speaks of "Men of Myalba" — Myalba being a Tibetan term used for one of the hells in the philosophy of Northern Buddhism, and Myalba is our earth. (Chapter 11)"

"Eternity stretches in one direction behind and in another direction in front of us, and along and within this eternity numberless multitudes of beings and entities have been evolving — and will evolve — forever. This progressive growth is continuously in action throughout universal nature — nebula or comet, star or planet, atom or electron, all exemplify it on one side of the picture; and, on the other side, gods, cosmic spirits or dhyani-chohans, men, the beasts, and all so-called animate entities. (Chapter 6)"

"Indeed, this wisdom-religion was delivered to the first thinking human beings on this earth by highly-intelligent spiritual entities from superior spheres; and it has been passed down from guardians to guardians thereof until our own time. Furthermore, portions of this original and majestic system have been given out from time to time to various races in different parts of the world by those guardians when humanity stood in need of some new extension and cyclical renewal of spiritual verities. (Chapter 1)"

"Who are these guardians? They are those whom we call the elder brothers of the human race, and are men in all senses of the word and not excarnate spirits. They are, relatively speaking, fully evolved or perfected men, who have successfully run the evolutionary race and are therefore now in point of spiritual and intellectual grandeur where we shall be many ages hence. (Chapter 1)"

"Man himself in former lives set in action the causes which later, by rigid karmic justice, bring about the effects which he in the present life complains of and calls unmerited. This same mistake in misunderstanding the logic and delicate and subtle reasoning of the teaching caused in early Christianity that first fatal departure from the recognition of infinite and automatic justice in the world, to the idea that because man's sufferings seemed inexplicable they were therefore unmerited and due to the inscrutable wisdom of Almighty God — whose decrees man should accept in humility without questioning the wisdom of the providence thus erected in explanation. (Chapter 2)"

"There can be but one truth, and if we can find a formulation of that truth in logical, coherent, and consistent form, obviously we then can understand those portions of it equal to our capacity of comprehension. (Chapter 1)"

"It will be impossible to understand death and its mysteries as long as one concentrates attention on the mere bodies or sheaths in which this ray or flame of consciousness periodically enwraps itself. It is necessary to follow the peregrinations of the consciousness per se, if a man desire to know his postmortem destiny. When a man can do this he will no longer fear death, because he will see its non-existence except as a phase of life opening into peregrinations through inner worlds and spheres, till the devachan is reached; and he will recognize death exactly for what it is, the gentlest helper and friend that a man has. (Chapter 16)"

"Reincarnation comes under the more general doctrine of reimbodiment. It is the teaching that the human ego returns to earth at some future time after the change men call death... in order that the ego may learn new lessons on earth, in new times, in new environments; taking up again on this earth the old links of sympathy and of friendship, of hatred and dislike, which were apparently ruptured by the hand of death when the ego-soul left our spheres. (Chapter 2)"

"For of death, that blessed angel of mercy should not be feared. It is nature's most blessed relief and rest, for it is sleep, perfect and complete, and filled with ineffably lovely dreams. The man who has died sleeps in peace; and his spiritual soul, the peregrinating monad, gaudet in astris — rejoices in the stars. (Chapter 16)"

"Probably there is no single doctrine of the Esoteric Tradition which makes so instant an appeal as does the idea of the present existence in the world of great sages or seers. In most minds there lies an intuition that there must be in the world human beings of far loftier spiritual capacity and of immensely more developed intellectual power than the ordinary run of men. Those who hear of this for the first time instantly turn to those luminous figures, such as Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Syrian avatara, Apollonius of Tyana, Lao-Tse, Krishna, Sankaracharya, etc. and, among many, the first reaction is: if such great figures have already existed in the world, why should they not exist again? (Chapter 19)"

"The Brotherhood of great seers and sages, united in a common purpose and governed by common ideals and esoteric knowledge, has existed as an association of high adepts under the direct inspiration and guidance of their hierarch, or mahaguru, for many millions of years — certainly for not less than twelve million; in other words, since the appearance on earth of the root-race which preceded our own present fifth root-race. (Chapter 22)"

"The cause of the disappearance of the Mysteries has always been degeneracy, faithlessness on the part of the students, and their lack of an imperative and heart-reaching call for light. Where there is a genuine spiritual and intellectual call issuing from both heart and mind, there invariably comes the response by way of a new installment of teaching from the Brotherhood. (Chapter 22)"

"Reverend Barber, at one point during the debate, a fly landed on Pence's head for nearly two-and-a-half minutes, prompting widespread commentary online. Professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of the best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist, tweeted, "As soon as Pence started denying the existence of systemic racism, the fly got him!" Amy Goodman You know, I couldn’t help but go to the Book of Exodus, where it talked about where God said, "If you don't let my people go, I'm going to cause flies to come as a sign of what’s wrong. But I won’t let the flies be on the people, but the fly will be a symbol that you're just wrong. You're lying. Let my people go." And Trump and Pence need to let the people go. They’ve been holding poor and low-wealth people hostage, essential workers hostage. It's time for a change in this country."

"If you have read one Kendi book, you have read them all. And whether one agrees or disagrees with his arguments, they are the very opposite of complex. He thinks in binaries. For Kendi, there are no ambiguities when it comes to understanding racism, no shades of grey... This definition is excellent, but Kendi has never demonstrated any aptitude for the qualities he lists. He is not interested in complicating, but in simplifying. He is not reflective or inquisitive, but dogmatic... We are often told that we need to discuss racism more openly, but the popularity of a thinker such as Kendi illustrates how hollow this pronouncement is. It also reflects poorly on the broader state of our intellectual culture. We need to treat racism with greater sophistication, but in his books there is little room for insightful discussion or debate. Kendi doesn’t offer true illumination, only thought-terminating bromides."

"If and when America and American freedom are really threatened, I have no doubt that American men and women will rise to the occasion and show the kind of nobility and heroism that was evident in the Revolution and the Civil War. But in the meantime, we need to stop glorifying all these wars that were criminal, or that could have been avoided. Memorial Day should be a day to demand peace, a day to demand an end to a military-industrial complex that claims nearly half of the nation’s general funds, a day to focus on the real threats to American’s “cherished ideals,” most of which are purely domestic, and a day to celebrate what those ideals are: , freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from government intrusion in our lives, the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty by a jury of our peers, and the right to stand up and say that our political leaders are, for the most part, crooks, charlatans and even war criminals."

"As for Marjah, its mention at all in the same breath as the American Revolution or the Civil War is truly grotesque. The little farming communities that PR machine lyingly described as a small city swarming with Taliban fighters was nothing but a staged and carefully managed battle set, designed to make Americans forget that the US was (and is) bogged down in an unwinnable war of conquest and occupation in Afghanistan. The few American soldiers and Marines who died there died for the sake of White Hours and Pentagon propaganda, not for the sake of defending Americans’ vaunted freedoms. The set has now been torn down, the klieg lights have been turned off, and “Marjah” has reverted to Taliban territory again."

"And I am even sicker of politicians who wrap themselves in the bloody flag and try to rub off some of the stench of death from the bodies of those who have died, mostly in vain for worthless causes, in hopes that taking on some of the odor will cause them to be perceived as admirable patriots themselves."

"President George W. Bush, who dodged danger in the Vietnam War by signing up for the Texas National Guard and then ducked even that domestic duty, and Vice President Dick Cheney who used five different excuses to duck military service, morbidly rubbed themselves with that flag for eight long years, even as they sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women into harm’s for political advantage. President Barack Obama (who also avoided military service), continued this ripe tradition when, in his weekly PR address to the nation, he urged to “leave a flower” on the grave of a soldier who died in one of America’s wars “so the rest of us might inherit the blessings of this nation.” Obama is also sending young Americans to kill and die halfway around the world in a war that has no purpose other than to demonstrate his political “toughness.” Yet he disingenuously declares that it was “to preserve America and advance the ideals we cherish” that “led patriots in each generation to sacrifice their own lives to secure the life of our nation, from the trenches of World War I to the battles of World War II, from Inchon and Khe Sanh, from Mosul to Marja.” What nonsense!"

"I’ll grant you that there were noble motivations that led many Americans to die fighting for this country’s independence. The same can be said for those soldiers who fought and died on the Union side in the Civil War who had the noble goal of ending the crime of slavery. And indeed it was the decision by a group of freed slaves in 1866 in South Carolina to disinter the bodies of Union soldiers who had died in Confederate captivity and who had been unceremoniously dumped in a , and to give them all decent s, that established the first Memorial Day. But to claim that the over 100,000 American soldiers who died on the in World War I were defending American freedoms, as Memorial Day speakers like Obama do year after year, is simply a lie. World War I was never about a threat to America. It was a war of empire, fought by the European powers, none of which was any better or worse than the others, and the US joined that conflict not for noble reasons or for defense, but in hopes of picking up some of the pieces. My own maternal grandfather, a promising sprinter who had Olympic aspirations, was struck with in the trenches and, unable to run anymore with his permanently scarred lungs, ended up having to settle for coaching high school as a career. (My paternal grandfather won a silver star for heroism as an ambulance driver on the front, but was so damaged by what he experienced that he never talked about it at all, my father says.) Sadly, their sacrifices and heroism served no noble cause."

"Add to that the other uncomfortable reality that many of the combatant deaths caused by US forces in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, border areas of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, are of fighters who are not terrorists at all, but rather, like the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces as well as the Pathet Lao in Laos, who fought and ultimately defeated US forces in the decade-long Indochina War of the ’60 and ‘70s, are actually “freedom fighters” who have been defending their countries from a US invasion and occupation."

"I learned that comprehending someone’s heartache is, unfortunately, very often the only way to stop condemning them…I learned that most of us wouldn’t necessarily do certain things over again—like not partake in a moment of passion—even if we know how long it might stay with us/hurt us."

"I apologise for everything…As a woman, I’ve apologised my whole life."

"After days of breathless reporting in the U.S. media about public and military support for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro collapsing, and about an April 30 coup by presidential poseur Juan Guaidó, we now know the truth: The whole thing was a fraud, staged at the instigation of Washington in hopes that the Venezuelan people and rank-and-file troops would fall for the trick and think an actual coup was underway."

"World War II, at least in Europe, may have had some moral justification, though there can be some legitimate debate as to whether the US and its freedoms were ever really threatened, and certainly many of the Americans who died in that war saw their struggle as worthy, so that we may at least in good conscience honor their deaths. But Khe Sanh? Mosul? And for god’s sake, Marjah? Let’s get real. Khe Sanh, one of the major battles in the Vietnam War, was just one little piece of a huge malignant disaster in a war that was criminal from its inception, and that had no purpose beyond perpetuating the neocolonialist control by the US of a long-subjugated people who were fighting to be free, just as our own ancestors had done. The over 58,000 Americans who died in that war, who contributed to the killing of over 2 million Vietnamese, many or most of them civilians, may have engaged in personal acts of bravery, but they were not, as a group, heroes. Nor were they over there fighting for American freedom. Some, like Lt. , who did not die, were no doubt murderers. Most, though, were simply victims–victims of their own government’s years of lying and deceit. If we memorialize them, it should be by vowing never again to allow our government to commit such crimes, and to send Americans to fight and die for such criminal policies. Sadly, we’ve already allowed that to happen, though, over and over again–in the Panama, in Grenada, in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan and perhaps, before long, Iran and/or Pakistan."

"According to some accounts, civilian deaths caused by America’s permanent war in the Middle East since 2001 could exceed one million. And remember, none of those deaths, occurring in places ruled by dictators, authoritarian governments or armed groups in the case of Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan, had any involvement in attacks on the US. Their deaths, whether caused directly or indirectly by the US military, can in no way be construed as “retribution” for the attacks of 9-11."

"As a father, as a girl dad, the portrayal of women in Black Panther is almost certainly what I admired the most, from the chief technology officer to even the baddest person on the film, who to me was the general, who was my favorite character and certainly my wife’s favorite character. But then also, I just want to again emphasize that this is possible. We currently have a tech industry where women and particularly women of color are far and away underrepresented or imagine that it’s not their place or imagine that they don’t have the intellectual capacity. And these are all sexist and racist lies. And women, particularly women of color, can be the chief technology officer of the baddest place, I should say the most technologically advanced sort of companies or places on earth. That’s possible, if we can create that type of sort of society."

"Certainly, before colonization, some of the greatest and most powerful and wealthiest and most technologically and intellectually advanced empires in the world were in Africa, from Ghana, Mali and Songhai...We’re not taught about precolonial West Africa. We’re not even taught about Africa today!... And I don’t think we should focus on Europe because that is a demonstration to me of racism."

"Part of the reason so many Americans are so defensive is because we’ve been led to believe that racist is a fixed category, that it’s a tattoo, it’s a label. Of course they’re going to say, “I’m not a racist, I’m not a bad person.” But racist is describing what you’re saying in the moment."

"Men can frighten us, other women can frighten us, and sometimes we worry so much about what frightens us that we wait to have an orgasm until we are alone. We pretend to want things we don’t want so nobody can see us not getting what we need."

"Take the president’s mention of . It is a city in Iraq, and the Americans who died there and in other Iraqi cities died because of the criminality of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who manufactured a criminal war of aggression against Iraq, a country that posed no threat to the US. They died too because of the cowardice and venality of the Democrats in Congress who allowed themselves to be bullied and extorted into supporting that criminal war. The five thousand Americans who died, and the hundreds of thousands more who have been gravely wounded in that war, not to mention the more than a million who fought there or worked in support roles for others who fought, were not defending any of our “cherished ideals.” They were simply helping oil companies like Exxon/Mobil, , Shell and yes, British Petroleum, secure control of the Iraqi oilfields. They were simply helping Bush and Cheney win re-election. They were simply helping inflate the profits of , , and Blackwater. Noble deaths indeed."

"I woke up in the middle of the night to the news that Chadwick had passed. And at first I thought it was a nightmare. Like many people, I was shocked. And then of course I came to see that it was real. And then I saw that he died of colon cancer. And my first thought was, why him? Why not me? It was really—it was crushing. It was crushing because of how much he had given the world, how much I adored him. It was crushing because I know how beloved he was and still is. And it still is crushing... I don’t even know if I can even—as you know, Amy, I don’t even know if it can even be described in words what Black Panther meant, what T’Challa meant, what many of those incredible characters meant, what Wakanda meant, what Wakanda still means to black people. And particularly those of us who are really striving to be antiracist... And like other black people who went to see the film and just as nonblack people, it gave me the ability to really step outside of myself, step outside of my world and imagine what’s possible. And there is nothing more radical and critical to transforming the world than a radical imagination. Of thinking about what is possible. I think Black Panther gave that to so many people."

"I don't hate white folk because I'm a Christian. How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?... Europeans are simply a different breed of human. They are socialized to be aggressive people. They are taught to live by the credo, "survival of the fittest." They are raised to be racist. Caucasians make up only 10 percent of the world's population and that small percentage of people have recessive genes. Therefore they're facing extinction. Whites have tried to level the playing field with the AIDS virus and cloning, but they know these deterrents will only get them so far."

"I define an antiracist as someone who is expressing an antiracist idea or supporting or an antiracist policy, policies that yield racial equity, while antiracist ideas talk about the equality of racial groups..."

"I think most Americans, without recognizing it, say and believe both racist and antiracist ideas. What I'm seeking to do is get them to recognize those racist ideas, get them to essentially get rid of them and essentially strive to be antiracist, strive to see the racial groups as equals."

"The working class in the United States has never been united; it’s always been divided along the lines of race. … Racism and capitalism emerged at the same time, in 15th-century western Europe, and they’ve reinforced each other from the beginning."

"…I just think there was some element of burying some stuff so that you can get on with your job and your life. I realized then that I was looking for stories that were behind the act, and I needed to find that, but I realized very quickly how difficult it was going to be. I didn’t want people who were wanting to talk, in a sense."

"As soon as Pence started denying the existence of systemic racism, the fly got him!"

"Notions of objectivity, removed scientific inquiry, unbiased scholarly assessments, empiricism, standardized tests, universalism, evolutionism, and Eurocentric thinking are a few of the many constructs that academics, politicians, and benefactors used to mask the preponderance of whiteness—white ideas, people, and scholarship—as normal. Thus, white racists and capitalists and black accommodationists actively created and maintained this white normality by masking it, by removing the adjectives, by denigrating and downgrading everything non-European, everything outside of the Eurocentric or capitalist homily. European history and literature were not presented as such. Academics labeled it the history and literature. By conceiving of European (and Euro-American) scholarship as superior to all others, they racialized it, they gave it whiteness—an officious social construct of racial superiority."

"Kendi is so unbelievably stupid, mindbogglingly dogmatic, boring and limited in range that I would much rather read MLK [Martin Luther King] than have to endure sitting down with Kendi. I teach Kendi because he is useful. Where he is useful is there are no nuances in him. None whatsoever. No ambiguities. Everything is racism, all the time. I did learn something very interesting from Kendi. There's one line that appears in his two major books. This is what my life has come to, that I have read the two major books, "Stamped from the Beginning" and "How to be an antiracist". It reappears each time, and the line is "There is nothing wrong with black people." I think that line explains why Kendi is writing, and why white people buy Kendi's books. It's to be reassured that racism explains everything, and that there isn't one drop, one percent, one element, of black responsibility in black life outcomes today."

"Academics ... taught the many altruistic African American college students to believe that their personal advancement up the American ladder of success advanced African America as a whole through the societal doors that graduates opened and through their function as role models. Meanwhile, academics, politicians, and capital allowed colleges and universities to serve as ladders, removing African Americans politically, economically, and culturally from the black masses."

"I take umbrage at the lionization of lightweight empty-suited empty-headed motherfuckers like Ibram X. Kendi, who couldn't carry my book bag, who hasn't read a fucking thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said he would have no idea. I'm sorry, he's an unserious, superficial, empty-suited lightweight. He's not our equal, not even close."

"…I think that my early plays had some things that only Hispanics could know what they were. I had to strive for more universal characters. We should present problems that people are able to identify with. In a way now, however, I don't write thinking of an audience anymore. What I think of now is: "Is this character true?""

"…I've been in the theater for ten years now, I've done some of the things I wanted to do. I want to go a little deeper in a way. I can see myself writing something more serious, the satirical kind of thing…"

"This is who I write about and who I write for. For the girls they were, for the girl I was, for girls everywhere who are just like we used to be. For the black and brown girls. For the girls on themerry-go-round making the world spin. For the wild girls and the party girls, the loudmouths and troublemakers. For the girls who are angry and lost. For the girls who never saw themselves in books. For the girls who love other girls, sometimes in secret. For the girls who believe in monsters. For the girls on the edge who are ready to fly. For the ordinary girls. For all the girls who broke my heart. And their mothers. And their daughters. And if I could reach back through time and space to that girl I was, to all my girls, I would tell you to take care, to love each other, fight less, dance dance dance until you're breathless. And goddamn, girl. Live."

"The world isn’t kind to black and brown girls, or black and brown women, especially when they come from working-class communities or from poverty. My girls taught me that it’s possible to make our own families, to find our families. They helped me believe in love and friendship and hope. But more than anything, after they had girls of their own, it was their girls who taught me the most important lessons: they helped me see the girl I was…"

"Because of anti-blackness in the United States and Latin America, most of us are either hyper-visible or invisible, or both simultaneously. So many people I’ve had conversations with don’t even know that Latinxs are not a race or that black people exist in Puerto Rico (and throughout all of Latin America) and that we don’t all look exactly the same. As a light-skinned black Boricua, I’m often read as racially ambiguous, and because of colorism, I benefit from my proximity to whiteness. I think it’s our responsibility (those of us who benefit from light-skinned privilege or racial ambiguity or whiteness) to have a reckoning with race, to do the work to actively address institutional racism, as well as racism and colorism in our everyday lives, not just in the public eye. Otherwise, we are complicit."

"My origins as a writer started with my father loving books and, for me, reading about the history of Puerto Rico from my father’s books and learning about this very early. This history deeply affected me and who I became as a writer. But also feeling like this history has been for the most part erased. It’s not something that we’re taught in school and it’s not something that Puerto Ricans or that Latinos learn, unless you go out and search for it. There are not a lot of resources. And, often when you find a history book, it’s not written by women, especially not women who grew up in poverty, so it’s not accessible to everyone."

"Jaquira Díaz is an unstoppable force. Her writing is alive with power. I stand in awe of what she brings us. The future is here."