"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners." - Edward Abbey
"Look at this traffic. Look at them, rolling along in their two-ton entropy cars polluting the air we breathe, raping the Earth to give their fat indolent rump-sprung American asses a free ride. Six percent of the world's population gulping down forty percent of the world's oil. Hogs!" - Edward Abbey
"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses." - Edward Abbey
"Science transcends mere politics. As recent history demonstrates, scientists are as willing to work for a Tojo, a Hitler, or a Stalin as for the free nations of the West." - Edward Abbey
"Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines." - Edward Abbey
"The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals." - Edward Abbey
"The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice." - Edward Abbey
"In the modern techno-industrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood." - Edward Abbey
"Grown men do not need leaders." - Edward Abbey
"The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education....The publication of high thoughts is the dynamic power in the arteries of life; it is the very soul of the world. Thoughts are a boundless sea, and the effects and varying conditions of existence are as the separate forms and individual limits of the waves; not until the sea boils up will the waves rise and scatter their pearls of knowledge on the shore of life." - Abdu'l-Baha (Persia), 1875
"What good is a school when you're hungry?" - Leila Abouzeid, "Divorce" (in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea's Women and the Family in the Middle East, 1985); Moroccan writer, journalist
Peter Abrahams (b. 1919); South African novelist
"Once again, we are in the maw of war, where thousands (if not tens of thousands) face death. The deaths of Iraqi men, women and children to protect the corporate interests of Western Industry! Is there something obscene here?" - Mumia Abu-Jamal, "Warlust - Again! (Iraq II)" (February 17, 1998); African-American journalist, writer, currently on death-row (a blatant, internationally-condemned frame-up)
"The inside operation of Congress - the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building - is a story of such monumetal decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it." - Bella Abzug (1920-1998), Bella! (1972); U.S. peace activist, antiwar activist, union lawyer, politician
"I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business." - Bella Abzug, Bella! (1972)
"Women don't want to join the establishment, as it exists. Women don't want to be mainstreamed in to a polluted stream. Women want to change the stagnant wastes into fresh and flowing streams, making them safe and green for everyone." - Bella Abzug, speech at the United Nations Conference on Women
Chinua Achebe (b. 1930); Nigerian novelist
Dr. Al "Blaster" Ackerman; U.S. neoist
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts power absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." - Lord Acton (1834-1902), Italian-born English historian, philosopher
"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities." - Lord Acton
"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason." - Lord Acton
"The system of corporate life is a new power for which our language contains no name. We have no word to express government by moneyed corporations." - Charles Francis Adams
"It is no coincidence that in no language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' appear." - Douglas Adams
"Politics have always been the systematic organisation of hatreds." - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1915), historian
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. May your chains set lightly upon you. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams (1722-1803); U.S. revolutionary, directed the Boston Tea Party, headed the demonstrations that led to the Boston Massacre
"All Im trying to say is theres lots of things a man can do and in societys eyes its all hunkey dory. A woman does the same thing, the same mind you, and shes an outcast." - Adams Rib (U.S. film, 1949), directed by George Cukor (1899-1983, U.S.), spoken by Katherine Hepburn
"With all [Rudyard] Kipling's insight he has, over and over, failed to distinguish between war and imperialism on the one hand and the advance of civilization on the other ["White Man's Burden"]. To 'protect the weak' has always been the excuse of the ruler and the tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of 'the white man.' " - Jane Addams (1860-1935), "Democracy or Militarism (April 30, 1899); U.S. social worker, feminist, anti-imperialist, Nobel Peace Prize recepient
Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote" (1915)
Jane Addams, "A Modern Lear" (1912)
Jane Addams, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements (1892)
Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace (1907)
Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, "The Triple Revolution: Letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson" (March 22, 1964)
Felix Adler, Creed and Deed (1850)
"I know how men in exile feed on dreams." - Aeschylus; Greek author <> "Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or an enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves." - Aesop (620-560 B.C.); Greek storyteller
"What do you want from me?! I'm just a word processor!" - U.S. film After Hours (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese (b. 1942)
I dont need no axe
to split/ up yu syntax
I dont need no hammer
to mash up yu grammar"
- John Agard, "Listen Mr Oxford Don";
Guyanan-born U.K. poet
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (West German film, 1972), directed by Werner Herzog (b. 1942, Ger.)
"What is really shocking and very upsetting - in fact, dangerous - for the future of civilization, is that the media have become the definer of public discourse. There are no countervailing institutions which are challenging this hegemony." - Eqbal Ahmad, "India, Pakistan, Bosnia, etc." (Z Magazine, August 4, 1993); educator, editor, essayist
(for Dax, a fellow traveller)
We who have listened to silences abort
before they were diagnosed
as stream-flow of seminal blood
out of tune with monthly cycles...
we who have collected clouds
that eventually burst into storms
and left us aghast as our crops
became feeders to ocean bound streams...
we who can point to fragments of kites
and strands of thread
entangled on high voltage cables
as evidence of our dispersed dreams...
we who can smell the stench of dead pigeons
by the waterless fountains of our memorial squares
as evidence of the death of the in
in our independence...
we who have danced at festivals of arts
while cripples from new tribes
walk around on stilts and trample
our pre-harvest fields of crops to death...
let us remember
how men of parliament vacationed the electorate,
bandits demanded donations with which to refill
treasuries they had looted into family pots,
and power dissolved the people...
let us remember
how men, feline skunks, bury their insides sub rosa
forgetful of bamboo groves whose sacred flutes will grow
to play the tunes they plant into beachsand
and manifest the ugly lump on the king's crowned head
which he forbids his barber to proclaim before the people
Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984); Spanish poet, Nobel Prize Laureate
Alexander Nevsky (U.S.S.R. film, 1938), directed by Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898-1948, Latvia)
"There is no way of convincing middle class America that there are people who have no alternative, that there are people who live in horror, that there are people whose lives are nightmares. This is not accepted. The world of the drug addict does not exist. The world of the criminal does not exist. The world of the murderer does not exist." - Nelson Algren (1909-1981), Collected Interviews: Conversations with Nelson Algren [excerpts]; U.S. author
"She [Simone de Beauvoir] stayed three days...I decided to show her Chicago's underside...I wanted to show her that the U.S.A. was not a nation of prosperous bourgeois all driving towards ownership of a home in the suburbs and membership in a country club. I wanted to show her the people who drove just as relentlessly towards the penetentiary and jail. I introduced her to stick-up men, pimps, baggage thieves, whores and heroin addicts...I showed her the electric chair, the psychiatric wards and neighbourhood bars where I told her everyone sitting around was a sinister character..." - Nelson Algren, Conversations with Nelson Algren, interviewed by H.E.F. Donohue" (1964)
"(Here)...on the other side of the billboards where the sick of heart and the lost in spirit stray...on the other side of the tv commercials, the other side of the headlines...are the pavement-coloured thousands of the great city's nighttime streets, a separate race with no place to go and the whole long night to kill...the nobodies from nowhere, the nobodies nobody knows, with faces cut from the same cloth as their caps, and the women whose eyes reflect nothing but the pavement..." - Nelson Algren, Chicago City on the Make (1951)
"Well, you asked me what's wrong with American literature and I think the trouble with American literature is it doesn't know who it is. It thinks it's Henry Miller writing to Lawrence Durrell and then it thinks it's James Baldwin telephoning Norman Mailer, and then it thinks it's Jack Kerouac, subsisting on Coca-Cola on a cross-country ride to nowhere...Actually, American literature isn't anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom, who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, 'Isn't anybody on my side?' " - Nelson Algren, excerpt from Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964), interviewed by H.E.F. Donohue
"A conference is a gathering of important people who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done." - Fred Allen (1894-1956)
"Imitation is the sincerest form of television." - Fred Allen
"A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for." - Gracie Allen (1905-1964), How to Become President (1940); U.S. comedian, actress
"I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history." - Paula Gunn Allen (b. 1939); Laguna Pueblo/Sioux writer, scholar
"Indians think it is important to remember, while Americans believe it is important to forget." - Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (1986)
"In Beverly Hills...they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows." - Woody Allen (b. 1935)
"You still think it's beautiful to die for your country. The first bombardment taught us better. When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all." - All Quiet on the Western Front (U.S. film, 1930), directed by Lewis Milestone (b. 1895, Ukraine)
"Whenever theres a big war coming, you should rope off a big field and sell tickets. And, on the big day, you should take all the kings and cabinets and their generals, put them in the center dressed in their underpants and let them fight it out with clubs. The best country wins." - All Quiet on the Western Front (U.S. film, 1930)
Jorge Amado (b. 1912); Brazilian novelist
American Dream (U.S. film, 1990), directed by Barbara Kopple
The American Friend (German-French film, 1977), directed by Wim Wenders (b. 1945, Germany)
Martin Amis (b. 1949); British novelist
For the bumps bangs & scratches of collisive encounters madam I through time's ruts and weeds sought you, metallic, your stainless steel flivver: I have banged you, bumped and scratched, side-swiped, momocked & begommed you & your little flivver still works so well.
I want something suited to my special needs I want chrome hubcaps, pin-on attachments and year round use year after year I want a workhorse with smooth uniform cut, dozer blade and snow blade & deluxe steering wheel I want something to mow, throw snow, tow, and sow with I want precision reel blades I want a console-styled dashboard I want an easy spintype recoil starter I want combination bevel and spur gears, 14 gauge stamped steel housing and washable foam element air cleaner I want a pivoting front axle and extrawide turf ties I want an inch of foam rubber inside a vinyl covering and especially if it's not too much, if I can deserve it, even I can't pay for it I want to mow while riding
"Never vote; it only encourages the bastards." - old anarchist slogan
"The '90s will be remembered as an exalted, glorious age in the history of western civ, at least by shareholders and CEOs. And among its more cancerous symptoms - which include recreational vehicles and cell phones - temp workers will be remembered as the invisibles, the untouchables, the slaves who built the pyramids. Necessary, but anonymous. And, in the greater corporate sense, nonexistent." - John Anderson, "Stuck in Cubicles - It Isn't Very Funny," newsday.com (1997)
The Anderson Platoon (French film, 1967), directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer (b. 1928, France)
There are on the earth 50,000 dead whom no one mourned
on the earth
unburied
50,000 dead
whom no one mourned
A thousand Guernicas and the message in the brushes of
Orozco and of Siqueiros
as broad as the sea this silence
spread across the land
as if the rains had rained blood
as if the rough hair were grass for many yards
as if the mouths condemned
at the very instant of their 50,000 deaths
all the living of the earth.
There are on the earth 50,000 dead
whom no one mourned
no one...
The Mothers of Angola
have fallen with their sons.
Andrei Rublev (Soviet Union film, 1969), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986, Russia)
Tremors of your network
cause kings to disappear.
Your open mouth in anger
makes nations bow in fear.
Your bombs can change the seasons,
obliterate the spring.
What more do you long for?
Why are you suffering?
You control the human lives
in Rome and Timbuktu.
Lonely nomads wandering
owe Telstar to you.
Seas shift at your bidding,
your mushrooms fill the sky.
Why are you unhappy?
Why do your children cry?
They kneel alone in terror
with dread in every glance.
Their nights ["rights"? - Schrift nicht lesbar] are threatened daily
by a grim inheritance.
You dwell in whitened castles
with deep and poisoned moats
and cannot hear the curses
which fill your children's throats.
"The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our blood-streams." - Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993)
"...Humans who feel the urge to take it easy but remain burdened by a recalcitrant work ethic might do well to consider that laziness is perfectly natural, perfectly sensible, and shared by nearly every other species on the planet." [read more] - Natalie Angier (b. 1958), "Busy As A Bee? Then Who's Doing the Work?" (New York Times, July 30, 1991); U.S. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, writer on science
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938-1997); Nigerian singer, activist
"84 ways to feminize humans:...Having your first real human talk with your mother and being told about all her old hopes and lost ambitions, and how you can't fight it, and that's just the way it is: life, sex, me, the works - and loving her and hating her for having been so beaten down." - Anonymous, "Barbarous Rituals: 84 Ways to Feminize Humans" (Pittsburgh: Know, Inc., nd.)
Anonymous, The Arabian Nights (translated by Sir Richard Burton)
Anthology, George P. Rawick, editor, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79)
Anthology, Benjamin Drew, interviewer, Testimony of the Canadian Fugitives (ca. 1850); U.S. abolitionist
Ą Nous la Liberté (French film, 1931), directed by René Clair (1898-1981, France)
"Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed [abortion]. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!"
-
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), The Revolution (4 July 8, 1869); U.S. suffragist, social reformer, abolitionist
Susan B. Anthony, "Woman's Half-Century of Evolution" (North American Review 175, Dec. 1902)
"The possibility of total destruction through nuclear war corresponds to a condition of ruin everywhere that makes such destruction attractive." - Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous, "The Enchantment of Nuclear Destruction" [quoted by Bob Black in Beneath the Underground (Portland, Oregon: Feral House, 1994)]
a thousand ghosts haunt our soul in birth waters
watch revolutions of worlds
they stole our sleep in a daylight siege
we were all away on the farm
My voice my voice they seek after my voice!
"I am visible - see this Indian face - yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't, we haven't."
- Gloria Evangelina Anzaldła, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
"The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desunados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history."
- Gloria Evangelina Anzaldła, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
"How could they go to work to enslave a free people, and call it religion, is beyond the power of my imagination, and outstrips the revelation of God's word."
- William Apess (1798-1839), in From the Heart: Voices of the American Indian (edited by Lee Miller) ;U.S. Pequot Indian, Methodist minister
"It is said that in the Christian's guide, that God is merciful, and they that are his followers are like him. How much mercy do you think has been shown towards Indians, their wives and their children? Not much, we think. No... Have you any regard for your wives and children, for those delicate sons and daughters? Would you like to see them slain and laid in heaps, and their bodies devoured by the vultures and wild beasts of prey? and their bones bleaching in the sun and air, till they moulder away, or were covered by the falling leaves of the forest, and not resist? No. Your hearts would break with grief, and with all the religion and knowledge you have, it would not impede your force to take vengeance upon your foe, that had so cruelly conducted thus...Can, or do you think we have no feeling?"
- William Apess
"...During the bloody contest, the pious fathers wrestled hard and long with their God, in prayer, that he would prosper their arms, and deliver their enemies into their hands...Nor could they, the Pilgrims, cease crying to the Lord against [King] Philip, until they had prayed the bullet through his heart...If this is the way they pray, that is bullet's through people's hearts, I hope they will not pray for me; I should rather be excused."
- William Apess
"You smell that? Do you smell that?...Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like - victory." -
Apocalypse Now (U.S. film, 1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939, U.S.), spoken by Robert Duvall (b. 1931, U.S.)
"The horror...the horror." -
Apocalypse Now (U.S. film, 1979), spoken by Marlon Brando (b. 1924, U.S.)
"Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500."
- Apocalypse Now
"We shall prevail! To begin with, we shall destroy the civilization you set such store by, and in which you are petrified like fossils in schist. The Western world is condemned to death. We are the defeatists...Laugh if you like, but we are the ones who will always offer our hand to the enemy."
-
Louis Aragon (1897-1982) quoted in Russell, Max Ernst: His Life and Work; French Dadaist/Surrealist poet, hero of the French resistance, socialist
Kritaya Archavanitkul, "Conversation with Demographer and Human Rights Activist Kritaya Archavanitkul: Emerging Issues in Human Rights in Southeast Asia," by Harry Kreiter (Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley; October 25, 1996); Thai demographer, human rights activist
"Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion."
- Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); German-born U.S. sociologist, political philosopher, historian
"[Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well."
- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963)
"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
- Hannah Arendt
"Worship of the Market and its invisible hand is fast becoming a world religion, in which economic growth has become the measure and the limit of our human project."
- Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Journey Into the 21st Century" (August 8, 1997)
"It is as if our experience in Haiti, after the restoration of democracy in October 1994, is being repeated on a global scale: after a long and difficult struggle the people arrive at the seat of power, only to find that the palace has been stripped bare."
- Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Turn Formal Democracies Into Living Ones" (September 19, 1996)
"A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments." -
Aristotle
"The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law."
- Aristotle
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Sophocles long ago
The Sea of Faith
Ah, love, let us be true
"The by-now ancient slogan of the movement for shorter [work] hours - 'eight hours work, eight hours sleep, and eight hours to do with what we will' - has been abandoned. The notion of free time is as distant from most people's everyday experience as open space. Labor has been dispersed into all corners of the social world, eating space and time, crowding out any remnants of civil society that remained after the advent of consumer society, and colonizing the live world."
- Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, "The Jobless Future" (1994); sociologists
Peter Arshinov (1887?-1937)
Antonin Artaud; French poet, playwright, actor, director
-
John Ashbery, "Drag Shutters" (1987;
Ashes and Diamonds (Polish film, 1958), directed by Andrzej Wajda (b. 1926, Poland)
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
-
Issac Asimov
"People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped. And that goes on 24 hours a day, every day in the year. And that's not exceptional, that's usual. It's the same in every city in the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad. Suppose we had...just silence. Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished. The jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over."
-
The Asphalt Jungle (1950 U.S. film), directed by John Huston (1906-1987)
"The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue...There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week."
- Margot Asquith, My Impressions of America, ch. 17 (1922)
The Assault (Dutch film, 1986), directed by Fons Rademakers (b. 1920, The Netherlands)
"I am sure that you will never end war with wars." - Nancy Astor (1879-1964), My Two Countries (1923); U.S.-born English women's rights worker
"Rackets, whoring, guns - it used to be beautiful." -
Atlantic City (U.S.-Canadian film, 1980), directedy by Louis Malle (1932-1995, France), spoken by Burt Lancaster (1913-1994, U.S.)
The Atomic Cafe (U.S. film, 1982), directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty
O my hard spirit, supple imagination!
Man's whole world is made here,
Here you can rest, where the crippled
From time to time a thimbleful of sand
Can you tell
"Imagine the vanity of thinking that your enemy can do you more damage than your enmity." -
Saint Augustine (354-430); Thagaste (Algeria), North African-born Christian theologian, philosopher
"I don't think that the world will be saved by a sense of threat."
- Kenny Ausubel, U.S. documentary filmmaker
Black as my night, anonymous here
By Kofi Anyidoho (b. 1947); Ghanian poet
[in The Penguin Book of Modern Poetry,
edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier]
this life would drown in blood
hammer falls on anvil of
this head, calabash cracks
scattering braindrops on pathways
offering a broken tale to passers-by
load guts of goats with power of
bulls, the fools we were
we would seek refuge on wings of their visions
deserting the dream we placed among the thorns
and in our brief madness we
exchanged lullabies for anguished cries
when prowlers of night
sneaked into our pillows
oh they would ambush our sleep
and strangle our dream
the vampires! I saw them
they know I saw them when
father sent me home to fetch a little salt
Do not put me to sleep my people.
"Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create."
- Gloria Evangelina Anzaldła, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987); Tejana Chicana poet
"Now let me ask you, white man, if it is a disgrace for to eat, drink, and sleep with the image of God, or sit, or walk and talk with them. Or have you the folly to think that the white man, being one in fifteen or sixteen, are the only beloved images of God? Assemble all nations together in your imagination, and then let the whites be seated among them, and then let us look for the whites, and I doubt not it would be hard finding them; for to the rest of the nations, they are still but a handful. Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it - which skin do you think would have the greatest? I will ask one question more. Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of their whole continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds and welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun? I should look at all the skins, and I know that when I cast my eye upon the white skin, and if I saw those crimes written upon it, I should enter my protest against it immediately and cleave to that which is more honorable. And I can tell you that I am satisfied with the manner of my creation, fully - whether others are or not."
- William Apess, "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man," The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe (1833; in On OUr Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, edited by Barry O'Connell, 1992)
"These children, who have no one to caress them, understand everything. These women whom no one loves now, are remembering. They shrink back into the shadows as if into some ancient church. They disappear at daybreak, having attained consolation through silence. Old men stand about, wrapped in icy fog. These old men have the right to beg without humility."
- Guillaume Apollinaire [in "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer," by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, The Atlantic Monthly, June 1988]
"Of course the U.S. has its own agenda here [Haiti]...This is normal, capitalistic behavior, and I don't care if the U.S. wants to do it at home...But it is monstrous to come down here and impose your will on another people..."
-
Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide (b. 1953), Haitian Roman Catholic priest, President [in Amy Wilentz, Rainy Season (1989); cited by Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993), "Chapter Eight: The Tragedy of Haiti"]
yea, for sword and spear shall cease.
All things all around are teeming
with the mellow gifts of Peace."
by Matthew Arnold
(1822-1888; England)
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straights; on the French Coast, the light
Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadences slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow,
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
hearing it by this distant northern sea.
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath,
Of the night wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
And here we are as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
How you can't see in the dark, but I see
That tribes have gathered in this last, plush valley
Under a millennial tree, to sort out, bathe
And remove the last vestiges of ambiguous
Truth, of European civilization, and our arrival
May be shuttered in dark early morning, better
Than the time it took to get here
And all the wonderful things we came to see."
in For Nelson Mandela [New York: Seaver Books, 1987],
edited by Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili);
U.S. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, educator
"From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war."
- Margot Asquith
by József Attila
(1905-1937, Hungary)
Like a dense downdrift of smoke
between land and leaden sky,
my spirit hangs low,
close to the ground.
It sways, it cannot fly.
Follow reality's heavy tracks,
take a look at yourself here,
where you came from.
Here, under a sky at other times so dilute,
near a solitary, gaunt, bare wall,
poverty's sullen silence
menacing, pleading,
washes away the grief
hardened on a brooding heart
and stirs it
into those of millions.
where everything is in ruins.
In an abandoned factory yard
a hardly dandelion opens its umbrella.
The days go down
the faded steps of broken little windows
into dampness, into shadows.
Answer now:
are you from here?
Are you from here, so that you are never left alone
by the grim desire to be
like those other sufferers
into whom this great age wedged itself
to distort and deform their every feature?
picket fence, with its harsh cries,
upholds and protects
a greedy moral order.
Can you recognize yourself? Here,
waiting for a well-constructed, fine
and concrete future,
are souls with the emptiness of vacant lots
lying around idle, mournful,
dreaming of tall buildings that weave
the noise of life. The tortured grass
is watched by glazed, fixed eyes:
bits of broken glass in the mud.
rolls from a mound. And at times
a blue or green or black fly
buzzes by,
drawn here from richer regions
by human waste and rags.
In its own way
the tormented soil
lays the table even here:
yellow grass blooms in a rusty pot.
what consciousness, what barren joy
attracts and drags you
relentlessly to this place?
What rich suffering throws you here?
This is how the child
who was shoved and beaten by strangers
returns to his mother,
Only here can you really smile or cry.
Soul, only here can you bear yourself.
This is your home.
by W.H. Auden
(1907-1973; England-U.S.)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports of his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of the old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the war till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report of his union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day,
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows that he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High--Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A gramophone, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of the year;
When there was peace he was for peace; when there was war he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
(Ride Me, Memory, 1973)
By Kofi Awoonor (b. 1935); Ghanian poet, novelist
my death in Elizabethville was your death.
Blood shed in Sharpeville was shed before in Ulundi
Alabama, Memphis
Fred Hampton on a Chicago bed
blood and gun fire in darkness
was it prophesied that the panther
shall die in his bed without a leap?
I hug my black skin here against my better judgement
hung my shields and sheaves for a season
Leaving Africa that September 1967
in flight from the dreams we build
in the pale talons of eagles yard
donkeys braying on the bloody field across the square
the bulge of my sails unfurl for the
harbour of hate;
The pride of this colour
by which they insist on defining my objection;
that I am a nigger is no matter
but that I died in Memphis and Elizabethville
outrages my self-esteem
I plot my vengeance silently
like Ellison's men in bright dens
of hiding and desperate anonimity
and with the hurricanes and eagles of tomorrow
prepare a firm and final rebuttal to your lies.
To be delivered in the season of infinite madness.
Quotations: Page Two
i fratelli de Socio