Political Quotes

[Pathless]

'White America's favorite myth is the myth of nonviolence, which really means that oppressed people should not use violence against the oppressor. Think of the only country in the history of the world that dropped atomic bombs on other human beings now coming to black folks, poor folks, and young folks telling them to be nonviolent! ...

The myth of nonviolence touches me very closely personally. I am totally committed to the concept of nonviolence. To me "Thou Shalt Not Kill" includes anything with life in it, so consequently I have become a vegetarian. But even so I feel that white America should never be allowed to utter the word "nonviolence" as long as the Indian is trapped up on the reservation. No group of people has been more nonviolent than the Indians over the past few decades. The sad reality is that Indians would have to go on the warpath for America to listen truly to their demands. America really respects violence, and she only pays attention when someone is staring at her down the muzzle of a gun...'

--Dick Gregory, No More Lies, pages 10-11

[Pathless]

"Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us... we would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?"

--Henry Miller in The World of Sex
Quoted in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels

[Pathless]

"We are a mixed race from Africa and Spain. No one should consider themselves a pure race, much less a superior race."

--Fidel Castro

[madeinrussia89]

"Comrade wolf knows who to eat. He eats without listening to anybody and it seems he is not ever going to listen. " (in response to the US annual presidential address)

- Vladimir Putin

[Pathless]

"But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. What greed and privilege build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove."

--Jose Marti, father of the Cuban Revolution

[Pathless]

"It is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing."

--Jose Marti

[Pathless]

"The poverty of the country is such that all the power and sway is got into the hands of the rich, who by extortious advantages, having the common people in their debt, have always curbed and oppressed them in all manner of ways."

--Nathaniel Bacon, late 17th century in Virgina colony

[Pathless]

"Why was it considered wrong to ask questions? Was I right when I resisted punishment? It was inconceivable to me that one should surrender to what seemed wrong, and most of the people I had met seemed wrong. Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers."

--Richard Wright, Black Boy

[flowperson]

" I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: nor am I one of your Hollywwod-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to posses mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me."

!st paragraph, Prologue, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1947

flow....

[Pathless]

"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

--President Grover Cleveland, message to Congress on December 3, 1886

[Pathless]

"A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship becuase it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police.... Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act."

--Reinaldo Arenas, Cuban dissident and exile; Before Night Falls, page 87

[Pathless]

"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle.... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will...."

--Frederick Douglass, 1857

[flowperson]

Pathless...Just a note to let you know how much I at least appreciate the quotations that you've been digging up. These days I write more than I read, so I don't run across so many myself. It's just amazing to me just how little has changed in basic beliefs over the centuries.

flow....

[Tao_Equus]

I second those sentiments

[Pathless]

"I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war."

--Dubya, January 27, 2002 in Charleston, West Virginia

379 days left, if he doesn't get impeached. Did Dubya go to war? I'd heard that he dodged it. Still, it's a hell of a values statement, don'tcha think?