Seen

A problem not seen is a problem not fixed.
--Elizabeth Warren

Sudden

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.
--Madeleine L'Engle [10.26.99]

Try

You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
--George Orwell

Why

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?
--Christopher Hitchens

Yes

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future world depends.
--Wallace Stevens [02.01.07]

Note

Epstein's suicide note will be released as soon as Barr finishes writing it.
--Julie Ford

Tomato

Every day we have to wake up, confront the most upsetting shit we've ever seen, and then walk around obeying laws and saying "it's tomato season."
--Sarah Lazarus

Trap

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.
--Robinson Jeffers

Curse

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
--Hannah Arendt [11.01.10]

One Step

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.
--Toni Morrison (March 1995)

Look

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.
--Dave Eggers [04.02.07]

Failed

To accept the climate emergency is to admit that we have all failed, in a major way. And this is not an easy thing to do.
--Greta Thunberg

Serious

It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.
--Mary Oliver

Question

The only real question to be asked of another is "What are you going through?"
--Simone Weil [05.14.99]

Love

If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.
--James Baldwin

Beacon

We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
--Margaret Atwood

Wicked

How long, Lord, will the wicked,
how long will the wicked be jubilant?
They pour out arrogant words;
all the evildoers are full of boasting.
They crush your people, Lord;
they oppress your inheritance.
They slay the widow and the foreigner;
they murder the fatherless.
They say, "The Lord does not see..."
--Psalm 94, excerpt

Limitations

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.
--Chris Hedges

Solemn

Politics isn't entertainment, it is not a performance to be critiqued. Reporting on national politics is a public trust of solemn importance that affects hundreds of millions of people.
--Maria Bustillos (Columbia Journalism Review; July 24, 2019)

Evil

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.
--Simone Weil

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.
--Pema Chödrön

America

I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
--Langston Hughes

Slowly

Sometimes you can only find Heaven by slowly backing away from Hell.
--Carrie Fisher

Practices

A religion is defined not just by its holy texts but also by how believers interpret those texts--that is, by its practices. The ways in which believers act out their faith define that faith.
--Kenan Malik (January 2015)

Care

One must care about a world one will not see.
--Bertrand Russell

Fearful

A common phrase on nineteenth-century tombstones went: "It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch."
--Sallie Tisdale

Erase

Whole societies can be taught to deaden feeling, to disassociate from their marginal and minority members, just as people can and do erase the humanity of those close to them.
--Rebecca Solnit (June 2013)

The Secret

Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.
--Chris Hedges

Potent

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
--Chris Hedges

Change

Each of us may be nothing more than a moving wave of change, but we are waves able to know that.
--Sallie Tisdale

Fight

I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
--Chris Hedges (May 2015)

American

I think that I'm particularly and uniquely and very deeply American. If we want to talk about the ideals that we stand for, all the songs and the anthem and sort of what we were founded on, I think I'm extremely American.
--Megan Rapinoe (July 3, 2019)

Paradox

The paradox of education is precisely this--that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
--James Baldwin

The Object...

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
--George Orwell

Responsible

In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Nowhere

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
--George Orwell

FORWARD

Is this the end of a story that has been told? Is the book of democracy now to be closed and placed away upon the dusty shelves of time? My answer is this: All we have known of the glories of democracy--its freedom, its efficiency as a mode of living, its ability to meet the aspirations of the common man--all these are merely an introduction to the greater story of a more glorious future. We Americans of today--all of us--we are characters in this living book of democracy. But we are also its author. It falls upon us now to say whether the chapters that are to come will tell a story of retreat or a story of continued advance. I believe that the American people will say: "Forward!"
--Franklin D. Roosevelt (November 2, 1940; final campaign speech, Cleveland)

Knows

Don't worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
--Joy Harjo

Engage

Applying the term "concentration camp" to the indefinite detention without trial of thousands of civilians in inhumane conditions--under armed guard and without adequate provisions or medical care--is not just appropriate, it's necessary. Invoking the words do not demean the memory of the Holocaust. Instead, the lessons of the Holocaust will be lost if we refuse to engage with them.
--Anna Lind-Guzik

No Limit

Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings.
--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Anything

Ask not for whom the little immigrant children suffer. They suffer for you. They are your harbingers, they are thousands of Cassandras now whispering in all our ears: "A government that can do this to us, can do anything to you, too."
--@LTrotsky21

Obligation

The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it--at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
--James Baldwin

Untrue

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream.
--W.E.B. Du Bois

Power

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
--George Orwell

Revise

Keep in mind that to revise means, literally, "to look at again," to re-envision. To revise a life means to see it anew, to see possibilities in it that you could not see before. Try to bring a fresh set of eyes to your life today. Keep moving.
--Maggie Smith

Fact

We may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone.
--W.E.B. Du Bois

Singing

People inspire each other in ways no one will ever understand. No one is coming up with any of this shit from scratch. We are standing on the backs of our ancestors and singing to and for each other.
--Anaïs Mitchell

Fantasy World

It's so much deeper than playing basketball for money and all that goes into the machine. We're really in a fantasy world and it takes away from you having feelings or expressing yourself as far as being a human being.
--Andre Iguodala

Team Sport

My folks raised me with the understanding that life is a team sport--and so is walking out of hell.
--Rachel Chavkin

Prisms

Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and that's essentially how we know who we are, by retelling and reframing these stories. Part of why these stories survive is they're like prisms where different things show up in them depending on the light of the current day.
--Rachel Chavkin

Trick

A rhetorical trick is being played on us when people use the term "abortion debate." Our right to bodily autonomy is not up for debate. A religious minority's move to control the bodies of half the country's citizens isn't a debate. It's an outrageous human rights violation.
--Lauren Groff

Justice

Perhaps, he thought, it'd be better to live in a story where the righteous were rewarded and the sinners were punished, even if the criteria for righteousness and sinfulness eluded him, than to live in a reality where there was no justice at all.
--Ted Chiang

Support and Defend

I took the congressional oath of office for a third time this week, and the most important of the 71 words in that oath was my vow to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." These words are especially critical and poignant this year as we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on our country.
--Gabrielle Giffords

Trick

A rhetorical trick is being played on us when people use the term "abortion debate." Our right to bodily autonomy is not up for debate. A religious minority's move to control the bodies of half the country's citizens isn't a debate. It's an outrageous human rights violation.
--Lauren Groff

Worthless

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make other people happy, because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless and they don't want anyone else to feel like that.
--Robin Williams

No Matter

Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Nothing

We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
--Margaret Atwood

Needs

Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.
--Bertolt Brecht

Sacred

Words are sacred. I believe they are more sacred to children than they are to most of us.
--N. Scott Momaday

Givings

You know, we all make deals in terms of how we think about the process of our aging. It's a series of givings away, a making peace with givings away.
--David Milch

Jew

As a Jew in America, I was raised to believe two rather contradictory things: The United States is safe for us, and our world can descend into bigoted violence at any moment.
--Mark Joseph Stern

Words

Don't tell me words don't matter.
--Barack Obama

Horse Race

Rank them. Sort them. Do whatever your cyberalgorithms tell you will get the most eyeballs. The political reporting is so fixated on who's winning or falling behind that the horse race eclipses the actual economic and social conditions of the country.
--Robert Hennelly

Once

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
--Charles Lamb

Monitored

Sometimes I am surprised by how little I mind having my behavior monitored.
--Susan Orlean

Fading Away

To age is to feel as if pieces of you are falling or fading away, so that you somehow take up less space in the world. So that you're harder to see.
--Frank Bruni

Commit

The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating--in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.
--Anne Morriss

Rules

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
--Malcolm X

Enough

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.
--Ted Chiang

Cherish

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: "Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen." I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
--E. B. White

Endure

To be breakable is not the same thing as to be perishable. Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years.
--G. K. Chesterton

Honor

Let's take a moment to honor the sacrifice of our brave school children who lay down their lives to protect our right to bear arms.
--Anonymous

Extensions

Algorithms and machine intelligence are only extensions of the men and women who create them.
--Louis Menand

What It Is

It's 2019. Can we all now please stop saying "climate change" and instead call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?
--Greta Thunberg

Wall

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
--Frank Zappa

Think

We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.
--Rod Serling

Disease

The appearance of anti-Semitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.
--Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (September 27 2016)

Marriage

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
--Pearl Buck

Want

You should always give thought to what you want and why you want it.
--Stacey Abrams

Substitute

Worrying about someone is a poor substitute for loving them.
--Talia Lavin

Essence

The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Disaster

We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster.
--Winston Churchill

Justice

The U.S. cultural concept of "Justice" is too often crippled by confining it to an emotional craving for retribution (revenge). The cure awaits the realization that the essence of Justice is fulfilled only with the healing of a wounded spirit. While that approach will not succeed in all cases, the righteous are not excused from the effort. These are ancient truths.
--Kirk Bready

Divine

All other mediums use technology to achieve our kind of magic. In the theatre, all we have is the most divine instrument ever created and that is the human form.
--André De Shields

Beyond

Every age has had its hopes, hopes that look to something beyond the life of the age itself, hopes that try to pierce into the future.
--William Morris (1885)

Supplant

Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.
--Sally Mann

Books

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature is dumb, science is crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
--Barbara Tuchman

Nervous

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.
--Shana Alexander

Wants

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Next

Whatever is next could be really enlightened, and it could be really ugly.
--Pete Buttigieg

Remember

Memory is not a quantifiable value in human life. Simply because our memories are not a perfect reflection of truth. What and how we remember is not directly based on facts. We remember what is good for us.
--Karl Ove Knausgård

How Else

Despair is, in a way, an appropriate response to the world; how else to face the corrosive power of time, how else to accommodate the brevity and frailty of the self?
--Mark Doty

More

Being with people I don't know and feel I have to entertain--I find that exhausting. But being with people I love? I have more energy after.
--Ina Garten

Shape

Stories are our way of coping, of creating shape out of mess.
--Sarah Polley

Simple

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
--Charles Mingus

Injecting

The world won't leave things be. It's always injecting endings into beginnings.
--David Mitchell

Hate

I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Culture

Culture is everything we don't have to do.
--Brian Eno

Interrogate

That's what makes the left the left. One is constantly needing to interrogate one's own assumptions.
--Tony Kushner

Stories

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind.
--Rebecca Solnit