Diamanda Galás (b. 1955); U.S. avant-garde vocalist, musician, AIDS activist
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." - John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908), Canadian-born economist, author
"The only way to get away from the influence of the American economy would be to float our half of the continent off somewhere else." - John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian
"I'll moider da bum." - heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, when asked what he thought of William Shakespeare
"For the nonviolent person, the whole world is one family. He will fear none, nor will others fear him." - Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948)
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of toalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" - Mahatma Gandhi
"If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake." - Mahatma Gandhi
Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928); Columbian-born novelist, Nobel laureate
"For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred." - John W. Garner
"My country is the world; my countrymen are mankind."
- William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879); U.S. abolitionist; founded the antislavery newspaper The Liberator
William Lloyd Garrison, "On the Death of John Brown" (speech, December 2, 1859)
William Lloyd Garrison, "The Governing Passion of My Soul" (14 April 1865)
William Lloyd Garrison, "Excerpt from The Liberator" (The Liberator, January 1, 1831)
"Enslave the liberty of one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril." - William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison, "Editorial,"
The Liberator, Vol. 1, No. 1 (December 12, 1805)
"We represent a new line of thought among Negroes. Whether you call it advanced thought or reactionary thought, I do not care. If it is reactionary for people to seek independence in government, then we are reactionary. If it is advanced thought for people to seek liberty and freedom, then we represent the advanced school of thought among the Negroes of this country." - Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), "The Principles of the U.N.I.A. - speech" (November 25, 1922); Jamaican human rights activist, poet
"Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is...1. Confusion. 2. Class Position. 3. Indifference. 4. Emotional Dependency. 5. Intellectual Dependency. 6. Provisional Self-Esteem. 7. One Can't Hide...It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things." -
John Taylor Gatto, speech on accepting the 1991 New York State teacher of the year award
John Taylor Gatto, "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher" (Whole Earth Review, Fall '91)
John Taylor Gatto, "The Public School Nightmare: Why Fix a System Designed to Destroy Individual Thought?"
John Taylor Gatto, "What Really Matters" (Natural Life Magazine, January 1995)
-
Marvin Gaye (1939-1984), "What's Happening Brother" (1971);
African-American vocalist
"Crime is increasing, trigger-happy policing
Panic is spreading, God know where we're heading.
Oh, make me wanna holler, the way they do my life,
It makes me wanna holler and throw up both my hands,
'Cause this ain't livin' "
- Marvin Gaye, "Inner City Blues (1971)
"Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination." - Martha Gellhorn
"Capitalist tyranny is destroying us." - film Germinal (Belgium/France/Italy, 1993), directed by Claude Berri (b. 1934, France), based on the 1894 novel by French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902)
"A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace." - Gersonides; Jewish philosopher
On the internet: "I'm inclined to think, this is just my hunch, looking at it from the great distance of my ignorance, that this accidental global post-national post-geographical thing that we've created - which is growing constantly and exponentially in an unplanned way - is very scary for nation-states in the traditional sense. Because where's the border? It's a violation of what they do. I'm also inclined to think, in the very long view, that a lot of what nation-states do, and have done traditionally, is responsible for a lot of the problems in the world. So if we're going to get to something a little better, this is maybe the only thing in the world that's pointing in that direction. This is taking us somewhere." -
William Gibson, "The Salon Interview," by Scott Rosenberg, October 14, 1996 (Salon Magazine)
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." - William Gibson, Neuromancer
"It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labours of peace." -
André Gide (1869-1951); French author
"There is big money in poor folks. There's millions of people that benefit. They eat because I'm poor. They never want to eliminate poverty. They just want to control it. The day they eliminate poverty, they go out of business." - Bertha Knox Gilkey (b. 1949), I Dream a World (1989); African-American tenants' rights advocate
"I write poetry because millionaires East and West ride Rolls-Royce limousines,
poor people don't have enough money to fix their teeth."
- Allen Ginsberg, "Improvisation in Beijing" (October 21, 1984)
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed..."
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955-1956)
"Free computerized National Police!
They say Blacks work sweating
"The wage they pay us is too low to live on. Tragedy reduced to numbers
See also: "CIA Dope Calypso" (January 1972), by Allen Ginsberg
Everybody got identity cards? At ease!
Freedom for Big Business to eat up the sea
Freedom for Exxon to examine your pee!"
- Allen Ginsberg, "Industrial Waves"
"Far Away" (1983)
By Allen Ginsberg
(in For Nelson Mandela [New York: Seaver Books, 1987],
edited by Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili)
in hot mines thousands of feet
deep in mountains of South Africa
to bring up gold & diamonds shining
on earth into the hands of White
bankers, politicians, police & armies.
This for the poor shepherds. I am a communist."
- Allen Ginsberg, "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound" (May 9, 1956)
"Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody." - Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), The Little Virtues (1962); Italian novelist, essayist
"As far as education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know." - Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues (1962)
"But the cold war is over, you might say, right? Is it really? Is there anything behind the talk we hear of peace from our leaders? Has much of anything changed? It doesn't appear so. In fact, it could be argued that things are much worse. Things are different, but the building of our nuclear arsenal has not stopped." - Jackie Giuliano, "Betrayal" (Nuclear Age Peace Foundation); environmental studies professor
"As long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering." -
Ellen Glasgow (1873-1948), Letters of Ellen Glasgow (1958); U.S. novelist
"America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind." - Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within (1954)
"The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it." - Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within (1954)
"But mayn't desertion be a brave thing? A fine thing? To desert a thing we've gone beyond - to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing -?" - Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), The Visioning (1911); U.S. novelist, playwright
"Workaholics are like hysterical dogs, addicted to the adrenalin high, chasing imaginary rabbits from morning until night."
- Victoria Glendinning, "Consider the Bee" (Daily Telegraphy, 1991)
"Anyone who works in an office knows that the 'work' could be done in half the time. It is spun out and made to last by means of meetings, conferences, cups of coffee, little chats, and telephone calls to the beloved. The man - or, more usually, the woman - who cuts through the nonsense and completes an allotted assignment in less than the allotted time causes frightful embarassment and receives littls thanks from anyone. She has revealed how few clothes Emperor of Work is really wearing." - Victoria Glendinning, "Consider the Bee" (Daily Telegraphy, 1991)
"I don't think I've ever really supported Clinton's presidency. He's just someone who has taken his personality and used it in a way to seduce people into believing that he is something that he's not, that he's someone who really fights for issues. When it came to really difficult decisions, he certainly didn't step to the plate." - Danny Glover, "On Movies, Money and Politics," The Nation Magazine (April 5, 1999); African-American actor, filmmaker
"Campaigning and raising money, the whole thing with Clinton or Gore and those guys--I refuse to do it. Those guys who want to sleep in the Oval Office, sleep in the mansion, it's about access." - Danny Glover, ibid.
"There is some change in America and the changes in America are not coming from inside America but from the struggle against America outside America." - Jean-Luc Godard, "Film and Revolution: Interview with the Dziga-Vertov Group" (October 1970), Focus On Godard (1972); French New Wave film director
Michael Corleone: "My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator."
Kay Adams: "Do you know how naive you sound Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed!"
Michael Corleone: "Oh. Who's being naive now Kay?"
"Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind." - William Godwin (1756-1836); British
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
- Leading Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trial before he was sentenced to death
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
"None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe that they are free." - Goethe
"He alone is great and happy who requires neither to command nor to obey in order to secure his being of some importance in the world." - Goethe
"Everything great and intelligent is in the minority." - Goethe
"The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime." -
Emma Goldman (1869-1940), "The Individual, Society and the State"; Lithuania-born U.S. anarchist, activist, writer
"Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today - economic, political, social, and moral - conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation?" - Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For"
"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." - Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931)
"Poor America, of what avail is her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey." - Emma Goldman, title essay, Anarchism (1910)
"As to the great mass of working girls and women, how much independence is gained if the narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the factory, sweatshop, department store, or office." - Emma Goldman
"The majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display." - Emma Goldman, "Minorities Versus Majorities," Anarchism (1910)
"There's never been a good government." - Emma Goldman, quoted by Katherine Anne Porter (Los Angeles Times, 1984)
"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism…Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others." - Emma Goldman
"The most violent element in society is ignorance." - Emma Goldman, Anarchism (1910)
" 'Readiness,' far from assuring peace, has at all times and in all countries been instrumental in precipitating armed conflicts." - Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931)
"The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed." - Emma Goldman, "Patriotism," Anarchism (1910)
"Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass."
- Emma Goldman, "Minorities Versus Majorities," Anarchism (1910)
"Wealth means power: the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade." - Emma Goldman, title essay, Anarchism (1910)
"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief...So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies." - Emma Goldman, Mother Earth (1911)
Emma Goldman, "Patriotism, a Menace to Liberty" (1911)
"When I was broke, I'd go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking." - U.S. film Goodfellas (1990), directed by Martin Scorsese (b. 1942, U.S.)
"You're trying to run the school like a factory for turning out money-making, machine-made snobs." - Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939 U.K. film), directed by Sam Wood (d. 1949)
"In India, an act of universal shame has been transformed into an act of bravery. Sheer Evil is India's new pride, and a country of historic greatness has sunk to sub-human levels far removed from its aesthetic and rebellious civilisations. The site of the nuclear explosions is not a real desert. The desert of Pokhran has its own life. It is the mind that triggers nuclear bombs that is the real desert. What it disseminates throughout the atmosphere is not wisdom and dialogue, but jingoism and radioactivity. Peace for India now booms out of its horrible hydrogen bombs. Its celebrations and self-congratulations are methodical and barbaric. Poison fills the minds of the political leaders, scientists and mediapersons who raise their hands aloft in a salute to bombs and jingoism. Horrific perversion. What else can the temerity to blast a hydrogen bomb along with two Hiroshima-type bombs on the very day of the birth of the Gautama Buddha be called!" - Ramesh Gopalakrishanan, "India's Nuclear Blasts - Siddharta's Betrayal" (C-THEORY, 27 May 98); Gopalakrishnan resides in the south Indian city of Madras. He studied mathematics, physics, and later philosophy, and is a keen student of Advaita Vedanta, the school of non-dualism founded by Sankara, the 8th century saint. His writing is primarily focussed in the areas of philosophy and literature
Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923), "The Salon Interview," by Dwight Garner, March 9, 1998 (Salon Magazine); South African Nobel Prize laureate, novelist
"Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?" - Nadine Gordimer
George Gordon, "The Law Enforcement Growth Industry" (ca. early-'80s)
"All phone calls are obscene." - Karen Elizabeth Gordon (b. 1950), The Well-Tempered Sentence (1983); U.S. grammarian
"Who are all these guys?" - Al Gore, looking at busts of the founding fathers while visiting the Monticello
"The Kings of steel, of petroleum, and all the other kings of the United States..." [Read more] - Maxim Gorki (Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, 1868-1936), "The Billionaire" (1907); Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright
"When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery." - Maxim Gorky
José Gorostiza (1901-1973); Mexican poet
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
"A far cry from their portrayal as primitive savages struggling to survive during every waking moment, [hunter-gathers] had structured their lives so that they needed little, wanted little, and, for the most part, had all the means of fulfilling their needs at their immediate disposal. The !Kung of southern Africa, for example, spent only twelve to nineteen hours per week getting food. Young people were not expected to work until they were well into their twenties; nor were people expected to work after age forty or so. They spent their abundant leisure time eating, driking, playing and socializing - in short, doing the very things we associate with affluence." - John Gowdy, "Introduction: Back to the Future and Forward to the Past," Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (1998, Island Press; edited by John Gowdy); professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York
"The more we learn about hunter-gatherer cultures, the more we realize that the value-system of modern market capitalism does not reflect 'human nature.' Assumptions about human behavior that members of market societies believe to be universal truths - that humans are naturally competitive and acquisitive and that social stratification is natural - do not apply to many hunting and gathering peoples. Yet in a very real sense, in the sense of having abundant leisure and unlimited access to all they needed, these hunter-gatherer societies were more affluent than our own." - John Gowdy, "Introduction: Back to the Future and Forward to the Past," Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (1998, Island Press; edited by John Gowdy)
"The view of human nature embedded in Western economic theory is an anomaly in human history. In fact, the basic organizing principle of our market economy - that humans are driven by greed and that more is always better than less - is a microscopically small minority view among the tens of thousands of cultures that have existed since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago." - John Gowdy, "Introduction: Back to the Future and Forward to the Past," Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (1998, Island Press; edited by John Gowdy)
"The mere existence, and in particular the success, of hunter-gatherer societies proves that there are ways of organizing production and distribution other than through markets." - John Gowdy, "Introduction: Back to the Future and Forward to the Past," Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (1998, Island Press; edited by John Gowdy)
"As an economist, the most important messages for me from...descriptions of hunter-gatherers are that (1) the economic notion of scarcity is largely a social construct, not an inherent property of human existence; (2) the separation of work from social life is not a necessary characteristic of economic production; (3) the linking of individual well-being to individual production is not a necessary charasteristic of ecnomic organization; (4) selfishness and acquisitiveness are not natural traits of our species; and (5) inequality based on class and gender is not a necessary characteristic of human society." - John Gowdy, "Introduction: Back to the Future and Forward to the Past," Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (1998, Island Press; edited by John Gowdy)
"Most of a hunter-gatherer's life is spent not at a workplace, away from friends and family, but in talking, resting, sharing, and celebrating; in short, in being human. This is an ideal of modern Western society, expressed in the major religions and in popular culture, but it is largely unrealized." - John Gowdy, "Introduction: Back to the Future and Forward to the Past," Limited Wants, Unlimited Means (1998, Island Press; edited by John Gowdy)
"Question authority! Before they question you." - graffiti
- graffiti found on a bathroom wall somewhere in the U.S.A.
Jorie Graham (b. 1951), "In the Pasture" (The New York Review of Books, November 28, 1996); U.S. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
"The point is there's a gulf in this country; an ever-widening abyss between the people who have stuff, and the people who don't have shit. It's like this big hole in the ground, as big as the...Grand Canyon, and what's come pouring out is an eruption of rage, and the rage creates violence, and the violence is real...Nothing's gonna make it go away, until someone changes something, which is not going to happen. And you may not like it, even I may not like it, but I can't pretend it isn't there because that it is a lie, and when art lies, it becomes worthless. So I gotta keep telling the truth, even if it scares the shit out of me, like it scares the shit out of you." - U.S. film Grand Canyon (1991), directed by Lawrence Kasdan (b. 1949, U.S.)
Moses Grandy (b. 1786?), Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America (1843); African-American slave, abolitionist
"I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled -" - U.S. film Grapes of Wrath (1940), directed by John Ford (1895-1973, U.S.), based on the 1939 novel by John Steinbeck (1902-1968, U.S.)
"Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. Can't nobody lick us. We'll go on forever, pa. We're the people." - Grapes of Wrath (U.S. film, 1940)
"If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money." - Robert Graves (1895-1985)
- Robert Graves, "The Next War" (1918),
from Fairies and Fusiliers (1918)
"The United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally." - Colin Gray (U.S. Defense Department consultant), 1982
"In a world more and more polluted by the lying of politicians and the illusions of the media, I occasionally crave to hear and tell the truth. To borrow a beautiful phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche, I look upon my friend as 'the beautiful enemy' who alone is able to offer me total candor. Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy." - Francine du Plessix Gray (b. 1930), in Adelaide Bry, Friendship (1979); French writer
Francine du Plessix Gray, "Starving Children"
Scott Gray, "Unjust!"
"We have stricken the [slave] shackles from four million human beings and brought all laborers to a common level not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by practically reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery." - Horace Greeley (1811-1872), founder of The New York Tribune, abolitionist
"There's no such thing as history, there are only historians." - Peter Greenaway, "The Salon Interview," by Christopher Hawthorne, June 6, 1997 (Salon Magazine); U.K. film director
"The peasants who settled in the [U.S.] cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for folk culture whose background was the country-side, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide." - Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Perceptions and Judgements, 1939-1944, edited by John O'Brian (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986); U.S. art critic
"Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life." - Germaine Greer (b. 1939), The Female Eunuch (1971); Australian writer, educator, activist
"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing." - Germaine Greer, in The Times (1986)
"I think it is reasonable that if we must continue to fight wars, they ought to be fought by those people who really want to fight them. Since it seems to be the top half of the generation gap that is the most enthusiastic about going to war, why not send the Old Folks Brigade to Vietnam - with John Wayne leading them? - Dick Gregory
"Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." - William Greider
"I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched." - Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843-1907), in Henry T. Fink, Grieg and His Music (page 8; 1929); Norwegian composer
"Sometimes it is named. Sometimes not. A movement, a ripple moving through the social body, a new shape in the shared thought of a society. This time it is a meeting. Distinct visions are coming together: the understanding that nature is a source of meaning encounters the hope for a just society. There is no simple name for what is occurring. But certainly a familiar habit of mind, already frayed, is dissolving." - Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (1995); U.S. poet, essayist, ecofeminist
"The activities of highly industrialized human society threaten the ability of the earth to sustain life. This is a staggering ovservation, difficult to take in: human society is destroying life on earth. Yet the condition is palpable. Air grows thinner, and death becomes more common among species." - Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life (1995)
"And yet another terrain seems to vanish too, if not the fact of land, of a certain orientation, a map of the world, stories of creation, histories, and, along with this, ways in which the world made sense and heaven and earth were connected into one pattern of meaning. If somewhere a shift in consciousness occurs which promises to open up new possibilities to the imagination, this is not the pervasive mood. One senses instead a kind of disintegration, a fragmentation of meaning as an older order which once unified and explained experience fails." - Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life (1995)
"There is a resemblance in the look and feel of a field that has been polluted with chemical waste, a neighborhood devastated by poverty and injustice, a battlefield. And this resemblance is not coincidental. The alienation of human society from nature has led to many different kinds of destruction, not the least of which has been the fragmentation of consciousness." - Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life (1995)
"Coming of age as I did after two world wars, one is wary of belief. The difficulty deepens, as so many utopias fail, and ideals are betrayed even by their own achievements. At times the only meaning that seems possible is meaningless itself. That over the last two decades deconstruction has permeated almost every form of inquiry with doubt is only part of this larger mood of unraveling. In Race Matters, Cornel West writes about the 'cultural decay and moral disintegration of poor black communities.' This is a disintegration one encounters everywhere, among the most and least privileged. Children murdered, rape, abuse, and the widening gap between rich and poor, hunger, deprivation etched in too many human lives. This is our social landscape." - Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life (1995)
"A history of empires and regencies, of warfare, injustice, inequity, slavery, has shaped the modern vision. Everything one sees, not only what one would leave behind, but also what one treasures has been touched by this inheritance." - Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life (1995)
"We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies...For we see ourselves and we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature." - Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (1978)
"The reason why our societies, both socialist and capitalist, are so insane is because we have been severed from physical existence and the deep, deep intelligence that is a part of physical existence." - Susan Griffin, "Rethinking the Left," by Jay Walljasper (Social Policy)
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by Susan Griffin I like to think of Harriet Tubman.
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Angelina W. Grimké (1880-1958); African-American Harlem Renaissance poet
"I ask no favors for my sex...All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks." - Sarah Moore Grimké (1792-1873), 1838 [Voices From Women's Liberation (1970), edited by Leslie B. Tanner]; U.S. abolitionist, women's rights activist, writer
"In Bloomfield, Ohio, two teenagers broke into an animal shelter late at night and beat 16 cats to death with baseball bats. No known motive. Should this offense have been punished as a mere misdemeanor or treated seriously as a felony worth a possible 10 years in prison? For the jury in this case, the whole issue turned on how much each cat was worth. A felony in Ohio requires at least $500 of property damage. Thus the prosecution had to prove that each cat was worth $31.25. If the cats had been pure bred Siamese, there's no question the killings would have been a felony. But in this case the cats were strays and defense attorney Kirk Daily successfully argued that because the shelter got them for free, they had no economic value. There's a valuable lesson for teenagers here somewhere. Meanwhile rumor has it the jury is hard at work on a math book based on the trial with problems like 'How many cats can Bob and Ed club if they are worth $20 a piece...'" (AP 11/7) - Wayne Grytting, "Class Divisions in the Cat World" (American Newspeak)
"In the hands of a people whose education has been wilfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade, and property." - Daniel Guérin (1904-1988); French revolutionary syndicalist, antimilitarist, journalist, anarchist
Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From theory to Practice
"Anarchism without feminism is a partial, crippled and ultimately oppressive tradition." - Krysti Guest, "Feminism and Anarchism: Towards a Politics of Engagement"
"When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist who is asked if he is a 'Newtonian' or if he is a 'Pasteurian'." - Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967), Argentinan revolutionary, assassinated by the CIA
"We have definitely become convinced that there is a common enemy...Our enemy, and the enemy of all Latin America, is the monopolistic government of the United States of America." - Che Guevara, "Speech to Medical Students and Health Workers" (August 20, 1960)
"Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love… Above all, always be capable of feeling any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world." - Che Guevara
"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country." - Texas Guinan, nightclub act (c. 1920); U.S. actress, entertainer
"If Jesus was to preach like He preached in Galillee, they would lay Jesus Christ in His grave." - Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), "Jesus Christ"; U.S. folk singer
"I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down nor rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself..." - Woody Guthrie, "WNEW" (Born to Win, 1967)
"I speak as a singer for the AF of L, CIO, Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods and all of the kids and childhoods and all of the other hoods but I fight against the white hood of the Ku Klux Klan because I hate them and their gizzards and their whizzards and their lizzards and I hate their hot tar and their feathers and their beatings and killings and hangings of union men and women all over the country. I speak for the human beings of this human race and when anybody quits being a human and goes to fighting against the union right then I jump on them with all of my teeth and toenails. And I grap me a root and I growl. And I hang on and I keep on singing and yelling and singing and yelling and singing and yelling and reading and writing and hollering and fighting and everything else..."
- Woody Guthrie, "WNEW"
"This land is your land, this land is my land..." - Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land"
