Reality Inertia

What Kafka knew was that there is no reason to believe that the reality we know and count on as reliable will not suddenly and arbitrarily alter. He knew that the assumption of continuity is based on reality inertia, on the belief that everything will stay as it is simply because it's always been that way.
--Aleksandar Hemon

Together

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
--Lilla Watson

Conquer

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
--Bertrand Russell

What Matters

What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
--Olivia Laing

Uncertainty

When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes--you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.
--Rebecca Solnit

So Many Ways

Nowadays there are so many ways of anesthetizing oneself against daily life, aren't there?
--Pope Francis

Change

Change only happens when ordinary people get involved, get engaged, and come together to demand it.
--President Barack Obama

The Experiment

It's not the nation I love. It's the experiment. The one that started more than two and a half centuries ago. As the flag stands for the nation, the nation stands for the experiment. The experiment was designed to prove something specific: that a people could build a country not on blood ties but on a shared vision, on the values cherished by the highest traditions of the Enlightenment: personal freedom, social equality, religious and ethnic tolerance, and the rule of law. Anyone wanting to help with the experiment was and is welcome to join.
--John Jeremiah Sullivan

Refuse

We must learn and relearn that age's necessary lessons: that meek submission is the most short-sighted of policies; that waiting for the other, more vulnerable group to protest first will only increase the isolation of us all. We must refuse to think that if we play nice and don't make trouble, our group won't be harmed.
--Adam Gopnik

Rough Beast

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
--W. B. Yeats

We The People

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
--Abraham Lincoln

Patriotism

Nihilists will tell you that all patriotism is ignorant nationalism. I prefer to think of it as mature love, good and bad traits accepted.
--Eric Garland

Moral Language

Moral language gives you new metaphors. You can say, I'm against this policy not because it's a conservative policy or a liberal policy, I'm against this policy because it's constitutionally inconsistent, it's morally indefensible, and it's economically insane.
--Rev. William J. Barber, II

Inhuman

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Planning

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
--E.B. White

Not Belonging

Totalitarian domination as a form of government...bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.
--Hannah Arendt

Anticipatory

And so we wait, in the state of anxiety and dread that anticipatory mourning brings with it: unsure of what is to come, fearing the worst.
--Meghan O'Rourke

History

Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.
--George Orwell (1944)

Dark

The Dark Ages were not dark because people knew their ignorance. They were dark because people believed they saw the light.
--Sarah Kendzior

Mankind

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.
--Dante Alighieri

How Easy

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in Communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
--Milos Forman

Take Care

Ordinary people aren't good at creating political cultures from scratch, so if we happen to find ourselves inside one that more or less works, we had better take care of it.
--Rob Goodman

Clear-Headed

We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.
--James Baldwin