Truth

All of this time I have been trying to explain to you this: a war with fascism is a war over reality. Fascism itself requires the obliteration of the truth. The erasure of the impacts of a plague that is devastating the country is the kind of thing only an authoritarian could do.
—Kelly Hayes

Crack

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
—Vladimir Nabokov [01.05.06]

Service

In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself. So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return.
—Stephen Colbert (2011)

What I Want

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life.
—Marina Keegan [06.04.12]

Offends

Don't allow people to get you to believe that you've offended God when in reality you've only offended them. What offends you reveals you.
—Earon M. James Sr.

Afraid

I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.
—Billy Connolly

Twilight

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness.
—Justice William O. Douglas [04.27.06]

Memory

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
—Vladimir Nabokov [09.14.06]

Shine

The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.
—Thomas Carlyle (1843)

Joke

It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning. They shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid the general applause from all the wits who believe that it is a joke.
—Søren Kierkegaard

Burning

We continue to believe in the future, even while we know what we know. Our world is burning.
—Casey Schwartz

Patience

Patience is the most heroic of virtues precisely because it bears no semblance of heroism.
—Giacomo Leopardi [08.30.01]

Coming

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
—Leonard Cohen [11.11.16]

Chain

We have sought to bind the chains of slavery on the limbs of the black man, without thinking that at last we should find the other end of that hateful chain about our own necks.
—Frederick Douglass

Advance

The real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.
—Albert Einstein (May 1949)

Grief

Sometimes, I can't help but feel that our grief is all this country will let us own. And though I'd very much like to pass onto you something other than this ghostly pain, America, it's all you deserve.
—Saeed Jones

Kick

We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can't slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
—Alan Watts

Useful

Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile.
(That which is beautiful is as useful as that which is useful.)
—Victor Hugo

Dominance

To refuse to listen to someone's cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.
—Ijeoma Oluo

Before

We can
Each of us
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.
—Octavia E. Butler [08.26.08]

Fiction

Things aren't necessarily going to be okay in a reasonable timeframe just because we want them to. To think otherwise is to succumb to the fiction, a sheltered, resource-rich mindset.
—Charles Yu

Odds

The odds against any of us being here at this moment are staggering.
—Roger Ebert [10.19.10]

Real

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
—Simone Weil [03.19.09]

Dew

The world of dew
is a world of dew,
and yet, and yet.
—Kobayashi Issa

Progress

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there.
—Malcom X (March 1964)

Public opinion

The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
—George Orwell (Freedom of the Park)

Tired

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
—Langston Hughes [12.07.16]

Shock

Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (September 1967)

Burden

In fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.
—W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk; 1903)

Rebellion

This is not a riot. It is a rebellion. A riot is what white folks do in Boston after the Celtics win the championship. A rebellion is when oppressed people resist state sanctioned violence.
—Matt Gonzales

So Unlikely

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.
—Rebecca Solnit

Depends

Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
—Ted Chiang

Safety

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.
—Joseph Conrad

Barely

While we understand, somehow, that this is precisely what love is—that the china bowl is beautiful precisely because it will break, that we love each other because we do not live forever—we can barely imagine what that means.
—Sallie Tisdale

By Design

A capitalist system automatically includes racism, whether by design or not. Capitalism and racism go hand in hand.
—Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)

Transformation

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered.
—Rebecca Solnit

Sin

Like everything else that we have, science has known sin. There is no such thing as a human enterprise that is not riddled with error and crime. We carry that evolutionary baggage with us wherever we go.
—Ann Druyan

More than

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
—George Orwell [04.06.10]

If you don't mind

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti [11.16.11]

Learn

Quarantine teaches me what I've already been taught, but I'll never learn—that there are so many other ways to be lonely besides the particular way I am lonely.
—Leslie Jamison

Money

Money is a very useful imaginary concept we invented. It's a tool. It exists to help us. We don't exist to help it.
—A.R. Moxon

In love

We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made,
In love we disappear.
—Leonard Cohen

History

There is no period so remote as the recent past.
—Alan Bennett (The History Boys)

Home

The shell of home is a prison of sorts, as much as a protection, a casing of familiarity and continuity that can vanish outside.
—Rebecca Solnit

Failure

Failure is just another name for much of real life: much of what we set out to accomplish ends in failure, at least in our own eyes.
—Margaret Atwood

Ordinary

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world. We can do this even at the most difficult moments.
—Pema Chödrön

Listening

Listening isn't that complicated. It's hard, but it's not complicated.
—Sallie Tisdale

Costs

Hunger has both moral and political costs.
—Amy Davidson (January 2016)

Miracle

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle.
Every prayer reduces itself to this:
Great God, grant that two and two be not four.
—Ivan Turgenev

Some people

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
—Virginia Woolf

Others

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, "What are you doing for others?"
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A lot

You really shouldn't say "I love you" unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.
—Jessica, age 8  [12.21.01]

This moment

High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
notes of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome
by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
—Jane Kenyon (Having it Out with Melancholy) [10.19.01]

Outgrown

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.
—John O'Donohue

Stories

We all live in that world of images and stories, and most of us are damaged by some version of it, and if we're lucky, find others or make better ones that embrace and bless us.
—Rebecca Solnit

Myth

You are watching people go through withdrawal from the emotional addiction to the myth of certainty.
—Ashley C. Ford

Angry

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
—Robinson Jeffers (1941)

Civilized

We have not civilized the world, we have materialized the world. Now we need to be civilized.
—Salim Ismail

Care

I hate language of "war." We cannot beat a virus in a war. This is a crisis of care. How do we care for each other, for those who need it most? How do you care for yourself? How should states, systems, businesses care? I don't care how we fight: I care how we care.
—Moraa

Wait

If you hate how dramatically fucked things feel right now, wait until I tell you about what's in store from global warming.
—Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Facts

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
—Abraham Lincoln [07.25.03]

Reality

One's reality doesn't simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the reality.
—Elizabeth Outka

Together

Coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The patterns of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers.
—Rebecca Solnit

Values

It's mind–blowing that anyone thinks we will democratically pass adequate climate policy without a revolution of values.
—Dr. Genevieve Guenther

Truthful

My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.
—Susan Sontag

Volcanic

The political possibilities of this moment are different than anything we have ever experienced. We possess a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the United States a more humane country. But if we fail to seize it, we will face mortal danger from the right. That's not hyperbole. The anger of Americans, once they figure out what's being done to them right now, is going to be volcanic.
--Jon Schwarz

Crime

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. ...In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
--John Steinbeck

Is

Silence is attention.
--Sallie Tisdale (Advice for Future Corpses)

Other Forces

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world besides the will of evil.
--J.R.R. Tolkien

Putin

All roads seem to lead to Putin with the president.
--Nancy Pelosi (October 2019)

Uncertainty

Looking deeper, we could say that the real cause of suffering is not being able to tolerate uncertainty--and thinking that it's perfectly sane, perfectly normal, to deny the fundamental groundlessness of being human.
--Pema Chodron

Gamble

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than doom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
--Rebecca Solnit

Keep Going

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Survival

We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.
--E.B. White

Emergency

Our present emergency and a common sense of decency make it imperative that no new group of war millionaires shall come into being in this nation as a result of the struggles abroad. The American people will not relish the idea of any American citizen growing rich and fat in an emergency of blood and slaughter and human suffering.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt (May 26, 1940)

If I can

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
--Emily Dickinson (If I can stop one heart from breaking)

New Dawn

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.
--John O'Donohue

Bad

Mass death is bad for business.
--George Latimer (Westchester County Executive)

Extremist

Not being radicalized by the Trump years is an extremist position.
--A.R. Moxon

Humanity

My last point is practice humanity. We don't talk about practicing humanity, but now if ever there is a time to practice humanity, the time is now. The time is now to show some kindness, to show some compassion to people, to show some gentility--even as a New Yorker.
--Andrew Cuomo

What is the point?

A better economic metric than GDP would be the percentage of people in a given society who are warm, well fed, safe, comfortable, and secure in their person and properties. Just those things. It's a more complex metric, but what, exactly, is the point of human society?
--Jeff McFadden

Get Real

I know, but what do you want me to do? I mean, seriously Jon, let's get real, what do you want me to do?
--Dr. Anthony Fauci (Science Magazine; March 22, 2020)

Connection

The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning.
--Rebecca Solnit

Stories

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
--Philip Pullman

Less

After forty years as an ecologist, I believe that the transition to a less materialistic world would be a cakewalk compared with living on a planet with too little photosynthesis.
--Peter C. Schulze

Interim

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.
"The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born."
--John O'Donohue

Souls

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
--Thomas Paine

Imagine

In the midst of the chaos we're all experiencing and the destruction of our societal norms before our very eyes, what can we build? How can we imagine something better? How can we help?
--Anna Jane Joyner

Shock

What a shock to the system. The realization that everyone's health and well-being is dependent on everyone else's health and well-being.
--Robert Roth

Name

The individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is literally to be spellbound.
--Alan Watts

Spellbound

The individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is literally to be spellbound.
--Alan Watts

Loss

Perfectionism is a form of being terrified of, and what follows that of is a blank every perfectionist would probably fill in differently, but whose large, generalizing term may be loss.
--Elizabeth Tallent

Effective

All your experiences are effective if you act with love.
--Yoko Ono

Not the same

The whiteness of the page before it is written on and after it is erased is and is not the same white, and the silence before a word is spoken and after is and is not the same silence.
--Rebecca Solnit

Capable

Every moment you are privileged to draw a breath in this life, you are capable of change. And you are capable of learning, and you are capable of growth. Why would you close the door to that?
--Mary Steenburgen

Planted

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.
--Audre Lorde

Break and Leave

We see the beauty of all that will break and leave us--a brief touch, a breath, a glance, a sip of water, the glowing leaves falling from the trees, the ones we love, and our own life.
--Sallie Tisdale

Shadow

She added up her life over and over, but the sums were never quite the same. Whose are? It's like measuring your shadow.
--Rebecca Solnit

Already

If you're asking when climate change is going to "happen," you're really asking when's it going to happen to "me," because it's already happened to many other people.
--Eric Roston

Back

Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it.
--Rebecca Solnit

It Exists

Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists.
--Sogyal Rinpoche [10.31.06]

Others

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.
--Mary Oliver

Perfection

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
--Rebecca Solnit

Contemplate

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
--Marshall McLuhan (1967)

Dismantle

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
--Audre Lorde

Move

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
--Rosa Luxemburg [11.30.11]

Despair

Despair, surely the least aggressive of sins, is dangerous to the totalitarian temperament because it is a state of intense inwardness, thus independence. The despairing soul is a rebel.
--Joyce Carol Oates [09.11.01]

Trying

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
--B.F. Skinner

Reliant

But I understood its final philosophical stance perfectly. Fragility and preciousness are not paired out of some regrettable irony; they are reliant on each other. It's because we know our time with people will end that we can find ourselves flooded with gratitude for their presence.
--Linda Holmes

Salvation

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.
--Chuck Close

Good

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
--Bertrand Russell [02.22.08]

Regularly

The grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.
--Rebecca Solnit [05.06.15]

By Name

Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
--Rebecca Solnit

Irritating

After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
--Evelyn Underhill [05.14.02]

Ask Myself

We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. And I don't think of it in a morbid sense. And every now and then I ask myself, "What is it that I would want said?"
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Loss

Loss is a cousin of loneliness.
--Olivia Laing

Notice

I often feel that women radically overestimate what men notice or care about.
--Zadie Smith

Teach

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.
--Tryon Edwards

Means

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [05.26.04]

Paradox

For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.
--James Salter [09.22.09]

Real

That's what real intimacy is about. Sharing secrets with one another--about what's on one's mind inside and out.
--Julie Gottman [07.13.09]

Memory

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
--Edward de Bono [09.11.02]

Like a Road

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
--Rebecca Solnit

Spaceship Earth

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
--Marshall McLuhan (1965)

The Meaning

And so it seems to me that the most essential element in the development of any creation, any art or science, must be love. A love that begins with the simple expressions of care for a little child. When people help us to feel good about who we are, they are really helping us to love the meaning of what we create.
--Fred Rogers

To Know

To know yourself is to let yourself be loved.
--Ben Watt [06.29.99]

Right

Human beings are never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
--Laurens van der Post

Sacrifice

It is Trump whose past has finally caught up with him; it is Trump who stands the most to lose; it is Trump who unilaterally can launch nuclear weapons. Trump has shown that human beings have little inherent value to him. If Trump senses he may have to make a personal sacrifice, he will sacrifice the world instead.
--Sarah Kendzior (April 2018)

Illusion

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubborn, persistent illusion.
--Albert Einstein

Curiosity

The problem is, time is limited and energy is so limited--the mind, also, of course. Thankfully, the curiosity doesn't end.
--Martin Scorsese