Promise

Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.
--Thornton Wilder

Absolute

It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.
--Joseph Goebbels

Plus

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
--Upton Sinclair

The End

Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
--Fredric Jameson

Practice

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
--Anne Lamott

Unbuild

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Strange

How strange when an illusion dies, it's as though you've lost a child.
--Judy Garland

Measure

Every photograph is a measure of time. Each can be considered a metaphysical time-stamp of sorts.
--Richard Misrach

Purchase

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
--David Foster Wallace

Genuine

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Discover

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Audacity

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cynical

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Daybreak

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

WRONG

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
--Elie Wiesel

Truth

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
--Winston Churchill

Equals

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.
--Pema Chödrön

Antithetical

It is time for the Statue of Liberty to return to France. She has been here for well over 100 years, and an investigation into her status clearly will show she has no work visa, so she is clearly antithetical to everything the United States now stands for.
--Mala Clemys

Unless

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.
--Edward R. Murrow

Travesty

And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency.
--Michelle Goldberg

Future

The future is not a blank page; and neither is it an open book.
--Lewis Mumford

2018

If this were a trilogy, 2016 would be the explosively dramatic establishment of conflict. 2017 would be the lowest point, when all seems lost. And 2018 would be the redemption, the triumph snatched from defeat at the last moment, the victory over darkness. Here's to 2018.
--Catherynne Valente

You Don't Know

You cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don't know.
--Matt Haig

Voyeurs

There are moments when it feels as if advanced global technology--smartphones with cameras, social media networks that transcend borders--developed just in time to render us helpless voyeurs to the world's demise.
--Sarah Kendzior

War

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.
--Robert Anton Wilson

Sentences

I'm always interested in the way people edit the details of their lives, the way they compress all the years into sentences.
--Peter Orner

Ailment

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
--Plutarch

Our Choice

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
--Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Race

Race is an idea, not a fact.
--Nell Irvin Painter

Half

The case for women is not that they are inherently better or more moral. It is that they are half of humanity and should have the same opportunities--and be judged according to the same standards--as the other half.
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Longing

The Welsh have a word for this feeling. The word is "hiraeth." It means a longing for a home you can never return to, a home which may never have existed at all.
--Laurie Penny

Impossible

Agnosticism is an ideology of unknowability, the conviction that is it epistemologically impossible to determine whether or not there is a deity.
--Michele Moses

Interwoven

Racism is so interwoven in the fabric of our country that when we protest racism, people think we are protesting the country.
--AdrianXpression

Swear

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual," of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
--Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

The News

I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news...if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.
--Frank Zappa

Weird

Repeated warnings from my 98-year-old grandma, a Nazi Germany survivor, chill me. She says it all started this way, with one weird unsettling development after another, until they were past the point of no return.
--Jonah Freedman

Clinical

We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.
--Frank Rich (November 2007)

Sunlight

When a tree falls in the forest, it leaves a gap in the canopy. Sunlight that younger trees and underbrush rush to claim. I see these harassers falling, and I wonder about the forest that will grow in the sunlight they're no longer taking up.
--Annalee Flower Horne

Change

Removing shame through deep social interactions and replacing abject isolation with genuine community greatly effects physiological change in a human being's brain.
--Z. Terach

Politics

The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will. If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.
--James Williams

Breath

The anxiety around sex is of the same order as the apprehension we feel in the presence of anything that still has the breath of God in it, that has not been flattened out with conscious intentions and explanations.
--Thomas Moore

Marvelous

How many kinds of love
Might there be in the world,
And how many formations might they make
And who am I ever
To imagine I could know
Such a marvelous business?
--Mary Oliver

Deeply

We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.
--Ram Dass

Open

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
--Muriel Rukeyser

WTF

Of all the great cosmic questions, WTF still strikes me as one of the most pressing, relevant, and ultimately humane.
--Christopher Hitchens

Kids

Republicans want life to begin at conception so they can convince themselves the kids they're attracted to are at least nine months older than they seem.
--Megan Amram

Sorrows

You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Do not hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.
--Matt Haig

Careless

They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Singing

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
--Bertolt Brecht (1939)

Indispensable

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body.
--Tim Kreider

Real

More and more, the ignorant of the land think they, and they alone, are the "real Americans." Those who can think logically and rationally are called elites, atheists and communists.
--Carole A. Dunn (June 2010)

Political

It wasn't a political decision, except insofar as everything a woman does with her body that isn't letting someone else dictate what she ought to do with it is a political decision.
--Hillary Brenhouse

Citizen

You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social.
--Rebecca Solnit

Death

And I hope that you die,
And your death'll come soon.
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon.
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed.
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.
--Bob Dylan (Masters of War)

Back Together

It's like every day you have to get up, put your heart back together, and get going again. What a time.
--Linda Holmes

Fucked

In hindsight, we were all fucked the moment "this is not normal" superseded "this is wrong" as a political argument.
--David Rudin

Magical

Evidently, the prospect that the world at its deepest level rests on a mystery we cannot solve this side of death is so terrifying to some that our wondrous dogs must be regarded as nothing more than meat machines lest their true and astonishing nature should cause us to consider how magical is our very existence.
--Dean Koontz

Lost

The Civil War is still going on. It's still to be fought and regrettably it can still be lost.
--Barbara Fields

Doubt

I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.
--Joan Didion

My Life

Instagram: My life is a party.
Snapchat: My life is a quirky TV show
Facebook: My life turned out great!
Twitter: We're all going to die.
--Mikel Jollett

Over

When it's over, it's over, and we don't know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
--Mary Oliver

Longing

The longing for a frictionless life is a death wish.
--Julie Goldberg

Why

Dear God, who I don't believe in. Why?
--Hayden Black

Myth

Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.
--John Gray

Associate

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
--Edmund Burke

Dignity

When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
--Bayard Rustin

Libraries

Libraries aren't just about books. They are almost the only public space we have left which doesn't like our wallets more than us.
--Matt Haig

Ambiguities

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tell Me

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
--Mary Oliver

See Yourself

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
--Marcus Aurelius

Life

Life is a near-death experience.
--George Carlin

Absolute

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
--Eric Hoffer

Uncomfortable

Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that, but unless it is talked about, constantly, it's not going to get better if people get bored. "Oh, is it that again? They're pulling the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?" Well, because it's uncomfortable, and there has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change. Whether it's the LGBT movement, women's suffrage, race, it doesn't matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people because we're comfortable. We still have no clue of what being born white means.
--Gregg Popovich

Cynical

No matter how cynical I get, it's just never enough to keep up.
--Lily Tomlin

Bomb

There is only one duty for the moment: every other task is a dream and a mockery. Stop the atomic bomb. Stop making the bomb. Abandon the bomb completely. Dismantle every existing bomb.
--Lewis Mumford (1946)

Fit

I still fit into the anxiety I wore in high school.
--Elizabeth Williams

Moron

He was a goddam stupid moron. He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
--J.D. Salinger

Numbness

Our numbness is our death.
--Lewis Mumford

Dead

If you're not getting older, you're dead.
--Tom Petty

Facts

"Don't politicize this tragedy" is American for "Don't discuss the facts that would help prevent and prepare for future tragedies."
--Toscha

Higher Form

To criticize one's country is to do it a service. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism--a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.
--Senator J. William Fulbright

Together

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we're all in this together.
--Brené Brown

Screen

Events cast long shadows before.
One such event would be a war.
But how are shadows to be seen
When total darkness fills the screen?
--Bertolt Brecht (1934)

Pigs

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.
--Eugene McCarthy

Soul

You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it. You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting.
--Mark Twain

Their Day

They are out there: the brave, the stoical, the imaginative and the decent. Despite everything, they will have their day.
--Roger Cohen

If

If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate, and fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill...if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog.
--Jack Kornfield

Written

It could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Extinct

That we die alone, however, seems nothing less than terrifying: Who wouldn't like company in the process of being extinct?
--Daphne Merkin

Loudly

Today I heard my heart screeching like a subway train
loudly enough to remind me it was still human
loudly enough to hurt.
--Audre Lorde

Radical

Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable.
--Junot Díaz

Newcomers

I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers--the people who strain hardest to become a part of it because they realize that it's precious; and who do the most to remake it so that our ideas, and our appeal, may stay fresh.
--Bret Stephens

Everywhere

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

--Warsan Shire

Pointless

It's totally pointless to try and hold Donald Trump accountable for anything. He's not running the country, he's just driving the getaway car.
--Martha Plimpton

Tested

We know ourselves only insofar as we have been tested.
--Wislawa Szymborska

Weather

Weather is the boundary between natural science and human history.
--Stephen Fybish

Infinite

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error.
--Bertolt Brecht

Grace

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
--Wendell Berry (The Peace of Wild Things)

Destiny

There is nothing more mysterious than destiny--of a person, of our species, of our planet, or of the universe itself.
--Brian Swimme

Excess

Don't ever be afraid of telling someone you love them. There are things wrong with your world, but an excess of love is not one.
--Matt Haig