Running Away

Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.
--Pema Chödrön

Lupus

Homo homini lupus. (Man is wolf to man.)
--Latin proverb

Militant

The paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician.
--Richard Hofstadter (1964)

Gas Station

Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.
--Senator John McCain

The Present

Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.
--Leo Tolstoy

Make-Believe

Government requires make-believe. Make believe that the king is divine, make believe that he can do no wrong or make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.
--Edmund S. Morgan

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

Empathy

The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity.
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Identity

When you're persecuted on the basis of your identity, you end up feeling that identity more poignantly.
--Iyad el-Baghdadi

Ready

We are oblivious of information until we are ready for it. One day, we feel a resonance, from the soles of the feet to the cranium. Without mediation, without apology, we read ourselves, and know what we know.
--Hilary Mantel

Do Not Do

What is hateful to you, do not do to others. All the rest is commentary.
--Hillel

Plain Speaking

Fake news is propaganda.
The powerful demanding apologies from artists is censorship.
Business dealings while in office are corruption.
Threatening protestors and petitioners is authoritarianism.
Declaring a minority an internal enemy and calling for militarized unity is fascism.
Everything starts with naming these things in public.
Resistance starts with plain speaking.
--Alex Steffen

Obsessing

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives.
--W. H. Auden

Apart

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
--Robert Frost

Kindness

Now is the time for kindness.
--Margaret Edson

Attitude

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
--George Orwell

Fully

We need to mourn all these injuries fully, so that they do not drag us into despair, so repair will be possible.
--Junot Diaz

Voice Be Still

If it be your will
That I speak no more,
And my voice be still
As it was before.
I will speak no more.
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will.
--Leonard Cohen

Long After

Now, I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back.
They're movin' us tomorrow to the tower down the track.
But you'll be hearin' from me, baby, long after I'm gone.
I'll be speakin' to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.
--Leonard Cohen

Darker

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim.
I struggled with some demons,
They were middle-class and tame.
I didn't know I had permission
to murder and to maim.
You want it darker.
We kill the flame.
--Leonard Cohen

White Man

There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code.
Your private life will suddenly explode.
There'll be phantoms, there'll be fires on the road.
And a white man dancing.
--Leonard Cohen

Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
--Theodore Roethke

Other Side

Now I greet you from the other side
Of sorrow and despair,
With a love so vast and shattered
It will reach you everywhere.
--Leonard Cohen

In Love

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

Stubborn

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean.
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
--Leonard Cohen

Thirst

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change,
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say,
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
--Leonard Cohen

Holy Places

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

Real

It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
--Leonard Cohen

Pain

Often our pain encourages us to isolate ourselves. The truth of it is our pain is a badge for how we are members of this larger community. Recognizing this and recognizing our shared humanity is not a small insight.
--Junot Diaz

Value

You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.
--Louise Bourgeois

Vote

The vote is precious. It is almost sacred.
--Rep. John Lewis (D-GA)

Service

When it comes to public service, I'm better at the service part than the public part.
--Hillary Clinton

Women

Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies.
--Hillary Clinton

Jesus Himself

You could take Jesus himself and pummel him with tomatoes for decades and he'd come to be known as "that guy who smells like tomatoes."
--Paul King

Vote

A vote is a choice to join a power-seeking coalition. It is not a personal affirmation of a coherent ideology. It is not a moral choice.
--Clay Shirky

Pressure

Pressure lives in the future, not the present tense. If you can live in the moment, then you can enjoy the pleasure of it.
--Joe Maddon

Materials

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comforable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
--George Orwell

Attention

The important thing was first to attract attention. Then, having compelled people to notice him, he could proceed to hold their attention by refusing to make the slightest sense.
--Lee Siegel (Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence)

Cleaning

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
--Robert F. Kennedy

Dearer Stuff

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
--Barbara Kingsolver

Escape

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
--Marcus Aurelius

The Same

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same.
--Donald Trump

Brave

It's only during frightening times when you get to find out if your country really deserves to call itself the "home of the brave."
--Phil Klay

Forget

We forget that we don't always know what makes us happy.
--KJ Dell'Antonia

Decency

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
--Christopher Hitchens

Politics

When you have contempt for politics, you often get a politics worthy of contempt.
--Catherine Rampell

Created

We created God, and then pretended God created us.
--Louis Menand

Poet

I'm a poet, and I know it. Hope I don't blow it.
--Bob Dylan

Jew

As a Jew, I'm very judgmental. As a street Jew, doubly so.
--Sidney Lumet

Crisis

Only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
--Milton Friedman

Sign

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
--Honore de Balzac

Coherent

The paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.
--Richard Hofstadter

Caged

Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.
--Tennessee Williams

Remembering

The very act of remembering...gives one the "raw material" needed to construct plausible scenarios of future events and act accordingly.
--Dan Falk

Kindly

No apologies are needed for treating anyone kindly, compassionately and fairly.
--Suzanne Clothier

Lost

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
--Rebecca Solnit

Unless

I feel safe unless I start watching TV, after which, if I let my reptilian brain take over, I feel a bit panicked.
--Jack Shafer

The Hero

By overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us.
--Joseph Campbell

Odor

There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.
--Tennessee Williams

Reveal

Presidential campaigns are like MRIs for the soul. Whoever you are, the process will reveal you. And the deeper you go in the campaign, the more this is true.
--David Axelrod

Wicked

The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.
--Winston Churchill

Not Predictable

The unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.
--Rebecca Solnit

Less Free

We think we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free. When you make yourself less free, all that happens afterwards is that you are less free. You are not safer.
--Molly Ivins

Disguised

There's a lot of racism in this country disguised as patriotism.
--Colin Kaepernick

Abundance

As long as we believe in scarcity rather than in abundance, coupled with the belief that some people are more deserving than others, the human condition will only deteriorate.
--Christopher Ross

Virtue

Individual rich people can be virtuous. Rich communities never are.
--Alon Levy

Purpose

Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
--Rebecca Solnit

Follow

It's always the same, isn't it? Follow the money. Who benefits? Cui bono.
--Joseph O'Shaughnessy

Not Good

It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS... bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
--Les Moonves

Infinite Scroll

And now, who can keep up? There is a melancholy to the infinite scroll.
--Alexis Madrigal

Exist

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
--Gabriel García Márquez

Help Somebody

Sometimes if I'm sad or scared it helps me to help somebody else feel better. I call it "selfish benevolence."
--Sara Benincasa

Crazy

The pure products of America go crazy.
--William Carlos Williams

Present

The concept of always being reachable makes us present nowhere.
--Peter Arvai

Most Americans

We all know that when a politician or a member of the media uses the phrase, "what most Americans think" it's code for, "I'm pulling this next part out of my ass here, folks. I haven't bothered to check, and I don't suppose you will, either."
--Peter Ramus

Refresh

Immigrants do not dilute "Americanism." In fact, and to the contrary, immigrants refresh and reinforce "Americanism" by being most conscious of why they are here, and their concrete knowledge of what it means not to be here.
--Robert Eller

Ideas

Repressing ideas spreads ideas.
--Neil Gaiman

Failure of the Imagination

Ultimately the destruction of the earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can't buy and corporations can't command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain.
--Rebecca Solnit

Facts

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
--Aldous Huxley

Fall Apart

This is what the twenty-first century feels like: You sit at your computer trying to figure out how much of what you love is about to fall apart, and how soon and how completely.
--Stephen Marche

Character

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.
--Jean Paul Richter

Bereft

Don't you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft? There is something distorted about the psyche. It's a huge waste, and it's a corruption, and a distortion. Its like it's a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is.
--Toni Morrison

Joke

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

I'll Rise

You may tread me in the very dirt.
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
--Maya Angelou

The World Holds

Isn't it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?
--Mary Oliver

Species

Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something.
--Frans de Waal

Whole Life

My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can't despise my whole life.
--Tony Kushner

Conspiracy

The modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
--Richard Hofstadter (1964)

Breeds

Empathy breeds proper judgment. Sympathy breeds sorrow. Contempt breeds arrogance.
--Ray Jasper

Deceive

In the end deceivers deceive only themselves.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Heavier

Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become.
--Patrick Rothfuss

Civilization

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
--Sigmund Freud

Notice

Being a comedian, 80 percent of the job is just you notice shit, which is a trait of schizophrenics too. You notice things other people don't notice.
--Chris Rock

Think

Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be.
--Terry Pratchett

What's Wrong

The whole wide world is wonderin' what's wrong with the United States.
--Roebuck "Pops" Staples (Freedom Highway, 1965)

Eternal

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
--George Orwell

Majority

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
--Harper Lee

A Virtue

Cosmopolitanism is not a tribal trait; it is a virtue, as much as courage or honesty or compassion.
--Adam Gopnik

Pillory

Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs up useless hate, and another for whoever fails to tell the truth in time.
--José Martí (Our America, 1891)

Darkness

Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
--Mary Oliver