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"Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception." (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) "I know funny, and the state of the country today is no laughing matter." (Jim Carrey) [Atlantic] "People must stop focusing on the symptoms of hate, that’s like putting a Band-Aid on cancer ... We’ve got to treat it down to the bone, which is ignorance. The cure for ignorance is education. You fix the ignorance, there’s nothing to fear. If there’s nothing to fear, there’s nothing to hate. If there’s nothing to hate, there’s nothing or no one to destroy." (Daryl Davis) [Guardian] "It’s not any law anywhere and it’s certainly not the words as written in the Constitution, ... The laws we have, the institutions we have, those are all vitally important but fundamentally we [emphasis added] are what stands in the way ..." (Chris Hayes) [HuffPost] "[B]efore I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee) "The reality is that we have to be prepared to be as radical as circumstances dictate we should be. If you look outside these doors and you see a need for a change, then you should all be radical. ... And the reality is that we haven't found ourselves in the condition we're in because someone has been too radical for us. ... I would argue we haven't been radical enough." (Antar Lumumba) "At 38 colleges, including Yale, Princeton, Brown and Penn, there are more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent." (Kevin Carey) [HuffPost] "Wages and money imply exploitation—if not yours, then someone else’s. Through money and the wage, we individualize ownership, and where these instruments remain true collective ownership is thwarted." (C. E.) [commune] "Fraud and bribery are shocking, yes. But fraud and bribery’s lawful cousins—legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and other admissions practices that lower the bar for progeny of the rich and famous—are ubiquitous." (Alia Wong) [Atlantic] "[W]e must address hierarchy in all its forms—not just capitalism and the state, but also racism, patriarchy, and other systems created by unequal divides among humans, and between humans and the many others with whom we share our common home." (Symbiosis Research Collective) [ECOLOGIST] "[T]he hallmark of capitalism is poverty in the midst of plenty." (Erik Olin Wright) [JACOBIN] "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." (Ursula K. LeGuin) [ROAR Magazine] "Divided global working classes compete for survival in a race to the bottom." (Symbiosis Research Collective) [Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid] "No dictator can carry out his or her will without obedience from subjects" (Symbiosis Research Collective, citing Hannah Arendt) [Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid] "[T]hose in power will remain in power unless acted upon by an external force." (Nomi Prins) [TomDispatch] "Cooperation Jackson is an experiment; his [Kali Akuno's] hypothesis is that living and working in fully democratic communities will change the people involved. One of the experiment’s first steps, he believes, is for people to realize how capitalism has shaped them and to recognize how alternatives could refresh their perspectives." (Katie Gilbert) [Economic Hardship Reporting Project] "[F]rom a social, civic and individual empowerment perspective, ceding control of fundamental online infrastructure to a single company [referring to Google] is terrible" (Mozilla) [Guardian] "[A]nytime a company gets that large and gets that much economic power [referring to Amazon.com], it never ends well." (Steven Shamrock) [Guardian] "Corporatized outrage is fundamentally manipulative and tends to further the interests of the already rich and powerful. Rarely is it a force for social good." (Charles Duhigg) [Atlantic] "The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do." (Noam Chomsky) [Alternet] "The Senate Is an Institutional Barrier to Democracy." (Sohale A. Mortazavi) [Truthout] "I'd much rather be a pig than a fascist." (Porco, the main character in the film "Porco Rosso") "... the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent." (Taylor Swift) [Instagram] "If we expect judges to reach conclusions based solely on reliable evidence, Kavanaugh’s savage and bitter attack demonstrated exactly the opposite sensibility." (Robert Post) [Alternet] "Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation isn't democracy. It's a judicial coup." (Richard Wolffe) [Guardian] "Brett Kavanaugh's many lies should disqualify him from holding any office." (Rebecca Solnit) [Guardian] "The job of a Supreme Court justice is to defend the people, not him/herself." "Es terrible que se haya elegido a un hombre que tiene la capacidad de mofarse del Tribunal Supremo, de aterrorizar a gente de todo el mundo." (Danny Devito, translated) [EL PAÍS] "This makes him and his administration criminals of a historic sort. After all, he and his cronies are aiming at what can only be thought of as terracide, the destruction of the environment of the planet that has sustained us for thousands of years. That would be a literal crime against humanity so vast that it has, until this moment, gone unnamed and, until relatively recently, almost unimagined." (Tom Engelhardt) [TomDispatch] "This ruling [by the Supreme Court on 6/26/18] will go down in history as one of the Supreme Court’s great failures. It repeats the mistakes of the Korematsu decision upholding Japanese-American imprisonment and swallows wholesale government lawyers’ flimsy national security excuse for the ban instead of taking seriously the president’s own explanation for his action." (Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project) [ACLU] "Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula means not only eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons but also denuclearizing the land, air, and seas of the entire peninsula. This is not North Korea’s obligation alone. South Korea and the United States, which has in the past introduced and deployed close to one thousand tactical nuclear weapons in the southern half of the peninsula, also need to take concrete steps to create a nuclear-free peninsula." (statement by dozens of Korean American organizations) [truthout] "After the invasion of Iraq (but before the Madrid bombing) a colleague from Spain blistered my ear for an entire dinner about W. When I said I didn't support Bush and the Iraq invasion, he asked me "What did you do to stop it?" It stuck with me, and I came home and became a political advocate. So now I'm paying it forward. Don't just pray, DO SOMETHING." ("patriot," a comment in the NY Times) "Let’s begin to relate to our homelands in the way that our ancestors did, and re-experience that, reinvigorate it, regenerate that culture. The things that we experience as wrong in our communities, the gaps that we feel, the wrong we do to each other, all come from not having that relationship to our homelands, or not being able to because of contamination, pollution, displacement. We must focus on reconnection." (Taiaiake Alfred) [yes! Magazine] "[W]e all have a choice to do the right thing at any time; even in times of enormous trouble; [Johan van Hulst] used the power of disruption; disruption of an evil system and of the arrogance it entailed." (Emile Schrijver) "We have created a society that is morally bankrupt, and the victims are our children who have lost faith in authority due to our moral duplicity. This is the cause of school shootings." (Stephan Said) "The best impact is to use the power of local groups and nonviolent movements to exert pressure in the ways the system was designed to receive pressure" (Elizabeth Beavers) "It's not that democracy is dying. It's more like that deep-rooted but previously-concealed problems in our society are being showcased in a grotesque manner." "[O]ne of the biggest disasters to befall El Salvador—one that created hundreds of thousands of refugees even before the post-earthquake wave—was man-made, with the United States, not nature, being a major force." (Raymond Bonner) "But the problem is not the Russians — it’s us. We’re getting played because too many Americans are ill equipped to perform the basic functions of citizenship. If the point of the Russian campaign, aided domestically by right-wing media, was to get people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth, the bad guys have won." (Timothy Egan) "The violence and oppression built in the American frontier spirit continues to this date, lead by those with wealth and weapons." "I do not want my children to face a future where politics and public policy are dedicated to the achievement of a single goal: the unlimited accumulation and retention of wealth for the richest Americans, even at the expense of the poor and sick." (Lee Siegel) "It's not about bathrooms ... as it was never about water fountains." (on George Takei's twitter) "If immigrants must be deported, the first people of this land must have the right to deport all the latecomers." "[P]ower of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power." (Howard Zinn) "The vast majority of modern slaves are in chains not for sex, but so that you and I can save a few bucks at the store." (Benjamin Corey) "Saviors are not interested in examining their own privilege. We don't want to see that the systems of race and class and gender that keep us in comfort where we are -- in the "right" jobs and neighborhoods and schools -- are the same systems that created the problems we say we want to solve." (Jordan Flaherty) "The savior mentality means that you want to help others but are not open to guidance from those you want to help. Saviors fundamentally believe they are better than the people they are rescuing. Saviors want to support the struggle of communities that are not their own, but they believe they must remain in charge. The savior always wants to lead, never to follow. When the people they have chosen to rescue tell them they are not helping, they think those people are mistaken. It is almost taken as evidence that they need more help." (Jordan Flaherty) "[B]ehind every fortune is a concealed crime. I don't believe you can get rich while doing good -- wealth and justice are mutually exclusive. The more wealth exists in the world, the less justice." (Jordan Flaherty citing Honoré de Balzac) "That what we just need is the right person to graduate from Harvard, maybe Harvard Business School, and have this vision about how to change poverty, how to end poverty. That kind of imagination, that there's just the smart right-thinking charismatic individual, and that's how change is made, is completely the opposite of everything we know about movements. We know that real expertise and leadership around transforming poverty is going to come from masses of poor people in coordinated movement together solving these problems and creating a new world." (Dean Spade) "I do NOT pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one isolated Nation under greed, deeply divided, with liberty and justice for the select few. This is not because I am not a U.S. citizen. I just do not pledge allegiance to the flag of any political division on earth. Instead, I simply pursue peace." "[N]early every inch of the United States was in one way or another wrested from Native stewardship." (Alison Owings) "The continuity between invading and occupying sovereign Indigenous nations in order to achieve continental control in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global control is key to understanding the future of the United States in the world. The military provided that continuity." (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) "The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime." (Jody Byrd) "Who needs to abide by laws that do not honor our human rights?" "The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence." (Martin Luther King Jr.) "How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?" (Howard Zinn) "INEQUALITY IS 'STRUCTURAL' VIOLENCE" (Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett) "In the United States, the lack of accountability for elites goes hand-in-hand with a lack of mercy for everyone else." (Glenn Greenwald) "A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication" (quoted in Kozol's Amazing Grace) * End of List * |