Posts labeled Quotes
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"Even the African concept of time found its way into southern 'timelessness" and slow pace of life, explaining in part a southern interpretation of time that is strongly rooted in the African concept of time. We can conclude that much which is 'American' was at one time 'African.'
--Joseph E. Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture" (2005)
"It is hard to imagine what human life would be like without oral narrative, for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past. It is through prized stories, often enshrined in a ritual context, that a complex religious dimension is added to life."
--John D. Niles,
"Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature" (1999)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
“I could mention just one more thing… I have talked about it a great deal in the last few days: the administration of justice. Something is wrong with a society where, in the last four years, since 1960, twenty-six Negro and white Civil Rights workers have been murdered. In most cases, nothing has been done about it. Only one person has been convicted of murder. The others were not even convicted for murder, but, as in Montgomery the other day, the conviction was for conspiring to violate civil rights. The accused murderers of Rev. Reeb were released. We have got to go all out to deal with the question of segregation justice. We still have a long, long, way to go.”
--Martin Luther King Jr. (December 15, 1965)
#raremlk
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
"We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, 'God sent us by here to say that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.'"
--MLK Jr. (April 3, 1968)
#luminouslibrary
"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don't want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize, that isn't important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards, that's not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school.
I'd like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day, that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try, in my life, to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say, on that day, that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity."
--Martin Luther King Jr., "The Drum Major Instinct" (February 1968)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
"A realization of the inter-relationships within an ecosystem is essential for man's continued occupancy on earth. We cannot go on polluting our air or our rivers without affecting all life. We cannot, for example, continue with impunity to increase the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere at the rate it has been increased over the past fifty years. The consequences of such interference with the biosphere, the world ecosystem, would be disastrous climatic change."
--Raymond F. Dasmann, A Different Kind of Country (1968)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
"Coolness, then, is a part of character, and character objectifies proper custom. To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with... we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is ashe. This is character. This is mystic coolness."
--Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philososphy (1983)
"The Yoruba assess everything aesthetically--from the taste and color of a yam to the qualities of a dye, to the dress and deportment of a woman or a man. An entry in one of the earliest dictionaries of their language, published in 1858, was amewa, literally "knower-of-beauty," "connoisseur," one who looks for the manifestation of pure artistry."
--Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983)
So I'm driving down San Pablo in El Cerrito yesterday with just twenty minutes to spare before the Big Game, and there's a sign on the sidewalk that says "FREE BOOKS."
For me, this is like being submerged and seeing a sign that says "Free Air."
I make a u-turn, park, and walk into this storefront that is apparently a free book exchange. This is literary Shagri-La, but I've got to case the place before tip-off.
And damned if there aren't some cool old books in there. I start to gather a little stack. As it grows I wonder if I'm being greedy, so I take a closer look at the flyers posted on the wall: "Limit is 100 per person, per day." Wow. So I'm cool with my 10. By the time I left it was 16. Watching the game with friends, I gave some away. The Portable Aquinas to Snider. Marcus Borg to William & Danielle, plus a funny early-80s book on NFL Running Backs that I got for Will as a gag.
Here's quote from one of the books: The Revolution of Hope, by Erich Fromm:
"This book is written as a response to America's situation in the year 1968. It is born out of the conviction that we are at the crossroads: one road leads to a completely mechanized society with man as a helpless cog in the machine--if not to destruction by thermonuclear war; the other to a renaissance of humanism and hope--to a society that puts technique in the service of man's well-being."
--Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (1968)
“A griot (pronounced greeo) is one who, by memory alone, preserves and teaches the history and traditions of the tribe. In some traditional African societies, this master of “historical oratory” is an important sacred figure – akin to a story-teller, minstrel, jester, herald, annalist, troubadour, gleeman, and poet all rolled into one.”
--Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin (1977)
"No sharp dichotomy exists, but a kind of sacred-secular circular continuum.... There is very often a sacred quality surrounding the verbal rituals of the secular style, with all gathered around the rapper, listening attentively, looking idolizingly and lingering on his or her every word, mystically engrossed in the rap."
--Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (1977)
"We see, with deep feeling, that if Man is no longer (as one could formerly conceive him) the immobile centre of an already completed world--on the other hand from now on he tends, in our experience, to represent the very leading shoot of a universe that is in process, simultaneously, of material 'complexification' and psychic interiorisation: both processes continually accelerating.
It is a vision whose impact should strike our minds with such force as to raise to a higher level, or even to revolutionise, our philosophy of existence."
--Teilhard de Chardin (January 10, 1950)
Man's Place in Nature
"The unleashing of a voracious prison apparatus after the mid-1970s partakes of a broader restructuring of the state tending to criminalize poverty and its consequences so as to impress insecure, underpaid jobs as the modal employment situation of the unskilled segments of the postindustrial proletariat. The sudden hypertrophy of the penal state was thus matched and complemented by the planned atrophy of the social state."
--Loic Wacquant, "Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America" (2010)
"I am convinced that capitalism has seen its best days in American [sic], and not only in America, but in the entire world.... It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.... There is a definite move away from capitalism, ... capitalism finds herself like a losing football team in the last quarter trying all types of tactics to survive."
--Martin Luther King Jr., hand-written notes on capitalism (1951)
#raremlk
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing them with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
--Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System" (1965)
"The day has passed for superficial patriotism."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (April 30, 1967)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
#raremlk
"It would be well to remind white America of its debt to Dr. Du Bois. When they corrupted Negro history they distorted American history because Negroes are too big a part of the building of this nation to be written out of it without destroying scientific history. White America, drenched with lies about Negroes, has lived too long in a fog of ignorance. Dr. Du Bois gave them a gift of truth for which they should eternally be indebted to him."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (Feb. 23, 1968)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary #raremlk
"I saw Martin do things that truly made my flesh shake on my bones… That’s how I really got with him. I began to feel like he was a man who really was living what he preached. I’ve seen Martin, knowing how bad the Klan wanted him, I’ve seen him do things no normal man could do."
--Hosea Williams
(speaking about the campaign in St. Augustine, FL, 1964)
#luminouslibrary
"Dante in meditation"
"The Divina Commedia contains a large number of cryptograms which have never, so far as I know, been noticed.... A cryptogram, or hidden writing, is a deliberate arrangement of words, letters, numbers, or other signs, which is intended to conceal as well as express a meaning.... Among the cryptograms which I have discovered in the Divina Commedia are acrostics, telestics, interior sequences, anagrams, irregular letter clusters, string ciphers, and cabalistic spelling devices.
I am far from assuming that the cryptograms which I have discovered are all that Dante made.... The announcement that the Divina Commedia is teeming with cryptograms is likely, I am aware, to be met with incredulity."
--Walter Arensberg, The Cryptography of Dante (1921)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
"Crompton argues that environmentalists need to do more to challenge the individualistic worldview in their campaign work.... The research coming out of Yale's Cultural Cognition Project...has found that a major determinant of whether a person rejects the scientific consensus on climate change is whether they have a strongly 'hierarchical' or 'individualistic' worldview...78 per cent of subjects who display an 'egalitarian' and 'communitarian' worldview believe that most scientists agree climate change is happening (which is true) - compared with only 19 per cent of those with a 'hierarchical' and 'individualist' worldview.
For me, it follows from this that part of being an effective environmentalist is trying to win more people over to a worldview in line with the laws of physics and chemistry, rather than offering shopping advice and touting 'market-based solutions."
--Naomi Klein (NY Times, December 7, 2011)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
#readthomasberry
"We are not going to allow any military industrial complex to control this country."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1968, ten days before his assassination)
"The dispossessed of this nation--the poor, both white and Negro--live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)
"Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice.... Now we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that."
--Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968
"Calling someone a racist individualizes the behavior and veils the fact that racism can occur only where it is culturally, socially, and legally supported. It lays the blame on the individual rather than the systemic forces that have shaped that individual and his or her society. White people know they do not want to be labeled racist; they become concerned with how to avoid that label, rather than worrying about systemic racism and how to change it."
--Wildman and Davis, "Making Systems of Privilege Visible,"
in White Privilege, Rothenberg, ed.
"The attention of the audience is gained through a willingness of the performer to involve himself totally in the performance and to call for the audience to do so as strongly. This the artful talker does by 'dancing' his talk, by dramatizing himself and his argument in physical ways."
--Roger Abrahams
"White coaches resisted the jump shot for two decades. When Nat Holman, coach at City College of New York, saw his first jump shot in the late 1930s, he declared, 'That's not basketball. If my boys ever shot one-handed, I'd quit coaching.' In his autobiography, former Boston Celtics player and coach Bill Russell describes playing ball in the 1950s when coaches routinely benched players for taking 'Negro' jump shots. Today the move is so essential to basketball that we cannot imagine the game without it."
--GENA DAGEL CAPONI
p. 4, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', and Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
"To me, cosmology and empire are antithetical. Empire becomes a cosmology. It's a pseudo-cosmology."
--Matthew Fox
(Nov. 4, 2004. From the journals of Drew Dellinger)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.”
--Martin Luther King Jr.
from I Have a Dream: The Quotations of Martin Luther King Jr., Hoskins, ed. (1968)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
"Sgt. Pepper hit a nerve in popular culture as nothing before had.... 'For a brief while,' critic Langdon Winner famously wrote, 'the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.'
This was seen -- and is still remembered -- as a call to community. In some ways, the Beatles had represented this ideal all along: Through them, we witnessed the cultural power that a pop group and its audience could create; with Sgt. Pepper, possibilities of all sorts that felt boundless. Rock & roll became collusive with the social and political disruptions of the 1960s."
--Mikal Gilmore,
Rolling Stone magazine,
The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide
"A Day in the Life" exists in the space between unawareness and disenchantment -- the space that the times now moved in -- and it closes with the most famous moment in 1960s music: a single chord played by Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr, [George] Martin and Mal Evans across several pianos at once, reverberating on and on, like a possibility without resolution. It was the abyss at the end of the dream, the void that the dream had to somehow surmount. As that eventful chord lingered and then decayed, it bound up an entire culture in its mysteries, its implications, its sense of providence found and lost. In some ways, it was the most stirring moment that the culture would ever share, and the last gesture of genuine unity that we would ever hear from the Beatles."
--Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone magazine,
The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-By-Album Guide (2011)
#drewdellingersluminouslibrary
"In this extraordinary endeavor to create the country called America, a great many crimes were committed. And I want to make it absolutely clear, or as clear as I can, that I understand perfectly well that crime is universal, and as old as mankind, and I trust, therefore, that no one will assume that I am indicting or accusing. I'm not any longer interested in the crime. Peope treat each other very badly and always have and very probably always will. I'm not talking about the crime; I'm talking about denying what one does. This is a much more sinister matter."
--James Baldwin, "The White Problem" (1964)
As an independent scholar and renegade researcher, there's nothing I love more than coming across a super-cool book I've never seen before, especially if it's old, and awesome, and I get it for 25 cents at a library book sale.
Check out these quotes from The Situation of Poetry, a 1955 work by Raissa and Jaques Maritain. (I had known something of J. Maritain as an influence on Martin Luther King Jr., and also, Thomas Berry had mentioned to me that Maritain had influenced him. I did not know that Maritain had written on poetry.)
The Situation of Poetry:
Four Essays on the Relations between Poetry, Mysticism, Magic, and Knowledge
by Jaques and Raissa Maritain
"Poetry is the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is in itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God himself in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty. That which is thus conceived in the mysterious retreats of being is expressed with a certain savory illogic, which is not nonsense but a superabundance of sense."
--Raissa Maritain, p. 21
And check out this great quote from a footnote on p. 29:
"The originals of the images and forms which the language of dreams, poetry, and prophecy employs are found in the Nature which surrounds us and which appears to us like a world of Dream incarnate: like a prophetic language whose hieroglyphs were beings and forms."
--G. H. von Schubert, quoted in The Situation of Poetry (1955)
"Whenever the government provides opportunities and privileges for white people and rich people they call it ‘subsidies.’ When they do it for Negro and poor people they call it ‘welfare.’ The fact is that everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of ninety percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
Miami, FL
"You'd better know him, and know his name and know how to call his name. (Yes) You may not know philosophy. You may not be able to say with Alfred North Whitehead that he's the Principle of Concretion. You may not be able to say with Hegel and Spinoza that he is the Absolute Whole. You may not be able to say with Plato that he's the Architectonic Good. You may not be able to say with Aristotle that he's the Unmoved Mover.
But sometimes you can get poetic about it if you know him."
--Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago (1967)
“Instinctively rather than reflectively he had reached the conclusion that the whole universe was for him not object but subject—it was he."
--Romain Rolland, on Walt Whitman, in The Life of Vivekananda (1931)
"Myths grow like crystals, according to their own, recurrent pattern; but there must be a suitable core to start their growth. Mediocrities or cranks have no myth-generating power; they may create a fashion, but it soon peters out."
--Arthur Koestler (1959)
"Jesus Christ was not a white man."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"People ask, 'what's wrong with young people?' The question is, 'what's wrong with America?'"
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"All sorts of people can write a great song. It took Bob Dylan to rewrite our idea of what a great song can be."
--Jon Pareles
"I write because of my fundamental faith in the transformative power of narrative; not in the notion that simply by telling stories one might come to transformative truths, but rather that in unearthing the silences of the past we are necessarily involved in understanding the forces by which those silences were created and are maintained."
--Jennifer Morgan,
in Why We Write: The Politics and Practice of Writing for Social Change
"The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is, rather, forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws: racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systematic rather than superficial flaws, and it suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)
"It's like I was a fictional character in my own life until I became real to myself by putting it on the page."
--Wendy Merrill
"There aren't enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
"For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage."
--Paul Krugman,
April 4, 2011
"The important thing about Jesus to me was one little line: He went about doing good. He went about doing good. Not simply talking it, but doing it; not reading about it, doing it; not repeating some worn-out cliches, but doing good."
--Rev. C.T. Vivian
(Quoted in Moldovan, 1999)
"The current electronic revolution is already so pervasive that we have difficulty in stepping outside of it and scrutinizing it objectively."
--Carpenter & McLuhan (1960)
"Archetypal metaphors seem to have a special rhetorical potency.... According to [Michael] Osborn, the primary sources of archetypal metaphors are derived from the fundamental human experience of water and the sea, light and darkness, the human body, war and peace, animals, the family, mountains, sexuality, and the relationships between above and below and forward and backward."
--John Louis Luciates & Celeste Michelle Condit
"You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is."
--W. H. Auden
Yes, that's w/ a capital "J":
from the Chicago Manual of Style. 16th Ed., p. 411:
"Jordanesque (a la Michael Jordan)"
King and members of SNCC, April 16, 1960 -- Raleigh, NC Dr. King in Durham:
"You students of North Carolina...have taken the undying and passionate yearning for freedom and filtered it in your own soul and fashioned it into a creative protest that is destined to be one of the glowing epics of our time.... What is fresh, what is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed and sustained by students. What is new is that American students have come of age. You now take your honored place in the world-wide struggle for freedom."
--Martin Luther King Jr. in Durham, NC, Feb. 16, 1960
"These persons gain prominence and power by the dissemination of false ideas, and by deliberately appealing to the deepest hate responses within the human mind."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1957)
"Repetition is the fundamental phenomenon of poetic form... All the principles that have been or may be used to generate formal structure in poetry are describable in terms of the repetition of either a certain physical feature of language--as in rhyme and alliteration--or a relationship among such features--as in stress patterns and syllable counts."
--Barbara Herrnstein Smith
"To the prophets even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions."
--Heschel, The Prophets, Vol. 1
Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King on the March from Selma to Montgomery "Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums."
-Abraham J. Heschel
"Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today...the cry is always the same -- "We want to be free."
--Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968
The Starry Night (1889) "First of all the twinkling stars vibrated, but remained motionless is space, then all the celestial globes were united into one series of movements....Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained."
--Vincent Van Gough
"For those who have experienced it, the hour of the awakening of the passion for knowledge is the most memorable of a lifetime."
--Colin Wilson
"However clearly we may think this or the other doctrine to be deduced from Scripture, we ought not therefore to impose it upon others...unless we would be content also that other doctrines should be imposed upon us in the same manner."
--John Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration
"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,"
--Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill"
"The religion of Jesus makes the love-ethic central. This is no ordinary achievement."
--Howard Thurman (1949)
To: Team Palin
From: Aristotle
Re: "Blood Libel"
"It is useful to have examined the number of meanings of a term...for clearness' sake (for a person is more likely to know what it is he asserts, if it has been made clear to him how many meanings it may have)."
"We ought to use our terms to mean the same things as most people mean by them."
--Aristotle
"The moment I feel that I don't have anything more to give musically, that's when I won't be found on this planet. I'm not sure I will live to be 28 years-old, but then again, so many beautiful things have happened to me in the last three years, the world owes me nothing."
--Jimi Hendrix
"We were made for the stars."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1966)
"We spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding."
--Martin Luther King Jr., at Drew University, Feb. 5, 1964
"Those who restrain their passions do so because theirs are weak enough to be restrained."
--William Blake
"Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace."
--Benedict de Spinoza, Political Treatise (1677)
"Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out."
--Martin Luther King Jr.
April 3, 1968
Thomas Berry at Prescott College (Feb. 14, 1992):
"I have been deeply interested in the small American college for some time, and for the last 10-15 years I've been saying that...the small college that declares itself to place its teaching within the comprehensive story of the universe and within the dynamics of the natural life systems of the planet Earth, would have a significant future.
I am proposing Prescott College as the first Ecozoic college known to the human community.
I have a feeling about Prescott College....The future belongs, in every profession, to those who are integral with the natural world, particularly, I think, education.
What I suggest to small colleges is that they work out their program, articulate their identity, and write up the thing, and then take out a full-page ad in The New York Times: 'Prescott College is based on the story of the universe and the survival of the planet Earth...and is the best possible preparation for all professions,'
The universe, throughout its vast extent in space, and its long sequence of transformations in time, is a single, multiform celebratory event. So the key issue at Prescott College has to be celebration. Celebration is the key to the future. It's the key to human energies. You can't have energies if you don't celebrate. Prescott College should be a place that celebrates the universe, that celebrates the deep mystery of things, in a meaningful way. And that is what education is. It's knowing how to enter creatively in celebration. It's knowing the universe, and knowing how to celebrate because we know the Great Celebration.
...What we need to do is to move into the future as a group, as a community, as the community of Prescott College. No one of us can do very much without everybody else."
--Thomas Berry at Prescott College,
February 14, 1992
(from the notebooks of Drew Dellinger)
"Art is not concerned merely with great artists, with genius or with prodigious skills. It is, fundamentally, the outward form of an inward search. To participate in this search, on whatever level and with whatever ability, is to be an artist."
--Andy Ford
(quoted in "Why Poetry Matters," by Alexandra Yurkovsky, SF Guardian, April 2003)
(Martin Luther King Jr. in Harlem, December 1964, his first speech upon his return from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway):
"This has been a marvelous...week in my life....I've been so moved by experiences that I had in Europe, meeting hundreds and thousands of people of good will. And so I tell you, my friends, for the last ten days I've been on a literal mountaintop, having transfiguring experiences.
Oh, we've had the privilege of meeting and talking with kings and queens, meeting and talking with prime ministers of nations, meeting and talking with the humble people of the land. I would love to stay here, because it's a marvelous mountain.
And I can tell you that it does mean a little something, because I do live almost every day under the threat of death and it is a fit contrast to have people saying nice things about you. It would be nice if I could stay up here. I wish I could stay on this mountaintop. For it isn't the ususal pattern of my life to have people saying nice things about me. Oh, this is a marvelous mountaintop. I wish I could stay here tonight.
But the valley calls me.
(Audience: laughter and applause.)
Read More
"I believe that the dignity and the worth of human personality will be respected one day. I believe this and I live by it."
--Martin Luther King Jr., in Harlem, December, 1964
"We have built...instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space....But in spite of this something basic is missing. In spite of all our scientific and technological progress we suffer from a kind of poverty of the spirit."
--Martin Luther King Jr., "Sense of Priorities," Feb. 6, 1968, Washington, DC
Dr. Cornel West (photo: glen E. friedman)
“…my basic aim in life: to speak the truth to power with love so that the quality of everyday life for ordinary people is enhanced and white supremacy is stripped of its authority and legitimacy.”
--Cornel West, Race Matters, p. x
"If we can put America back to work, we can pull America back together." --Van Jones, lecture at Princeton University
David Ray Griffin "One way the Bush administration prevented public questioning of the official account of 9/11 was by presenting it as a sacred story, so that any questioning of it would be regarded as not only unpatriotic but also sacrilegious."
--David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited
"The historical and the cosmic can be seen as a single process."
--Thomas Berry
"Our arrogance can be our doom. It can bring the curtain down on our national drama. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (Feb. 25, 1967)
read more here
"Mythological thinking is striving for a total world view.'
--James Barr
Here are a few quotes I liked from the book, Ignore Everybody, And 39 Other Keys to Creativity, by Hugh MacLeod:
"Ignore everybody. The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you....You don't know if your idea is any good the moment it's created. Neither does anybody else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is....And asking close friends never works quite as well as you hope, either. It's not that they deliberately want to be unhelpful. It's just that they don't know your world one millionth as well as you know your world, no matter how hard they try, no matter how hard you try to explain."
"Van Gogh once told his brother, 'No painting ever sells for as much as it cost the artist to make it.'"
(The following pithy statements are from cartoons that MacLeod draws on the back of business cards.)
"Stay ahead of the culture by creating the culture."
"I no longer have feelings. I had them once but then I got scared of being poor."
"the good news is they're hyper-connected. the bad news is, that's all they are."
"'I can't take this shit anymore!' he said, mistakenly."
"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
--Charles Horton Cooley
From Bob Herbert's column in The New York Times, May, 29, 2010:
"The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families....
It's not just a cozy relationship [between oil companies and the federal government]. It's an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.
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"The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human--at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience."
--Thomas Berry, who passed one year ago today.
"It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (Dec. 24, 1967)
"And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis."
--Tim Wise, on white privilege in the Tea Party
"The earth community is a wilderness community that will not be bargained with; nor will it simply be studied or examined or made an object of any kind; nor will it be domesticated or trivialized as a setting for vacation indulgence, except under duress and by oppressions which it cannot escape. When this does take place in an abusive way, a vengenace awaits the human, for when the other living species are violated so extensively, the human itself is imperiled."
--THOMAS BERRY (The Dream of the Earth, p. 2)
"A mind persuaded that is lives among things that, like words, are essentially significant, and that what they signify is the magic attraction, called love, which draws all things after it, is a mind poetic in its intuition, even if its language be prose. The science and philosophy of Dante did not have to be put into verse in order to become poetry: they were poetry fundamentally and in their essence."
--George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (1910)
Here's a quote someone sent me recently, from a talk I gave at Esalen in October.
"To look at the worldview that has brought us to the current planetary moment, we have to look at racism, systemic racism, as well as misogyny and patriarchy, classism, militarism. But I think we really have to take a long, hard look at systemic racism in order to understand the worldview that we're in right now, and the transformations that are happening. So I think that looking at a wider range of voices and looking at the history of genocide and oppression and slavery and segregation and the struggles of resistance against that, to build liberty, compassion and justice, is integral to the work of [the] Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness department...."
--Drew Dellinger,
Oct. 26, 2009 - presentation with Richard Tarnas on "Martin Luther King Jr.: Life and Transits." Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA.
The astronomer-priests of the Dogon [of Mali] had for centuries, it seems, a very modern view of our solar system and of the universe--the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, the spiral structure of the Milky Way Galaxy....They knew also of things far in advance of their time, intricate details about a star which no one can see except with the most powerful of telescopes. They not only saw it. They observed or intuited its mass and its nature. They plotted its orbit almost up until the year 2,000. And they did all this between five and seven hundred years ago.
--Ivan Van Sertima, Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern
Life is both nonsensical and significant....Only the ununderstandable has significance.
--Carl Jung
The great work [of art] is like a dream which...does not interpret itself...No dream says "Thou shalt" or "This is the truth"; it presents a picture, the way nature lets a plant grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions from it.
--Carl Jung
I think matter is extremely alive and spiritual in the deepest sense.
--Mary Daly
My definition of a writer: someone who is interested in everything.
--Susan Sontag
I think the artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.
--Romare Bearden
Each person has a literature inside them.
--Anna Deavere Smith
People change when they awaken to what is inside them already, and the art of change is to create the context for that transformation. That is done through stories, narratives, humor, the exploration of one's grief, but not by actually trying to change someone's views. That never works.
--Paul Hawken
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness--and our ability to tell our own stories.
--Arundhati Roy
For the first 90 percent of this country's history (about 350 years) slavery or legal segregation was generally in place. Only for the last 10 percent or so of our entire history have we been free of slavery and legal segregation. Thus, racial oppression makes the United States very distinctive, for it is the only major Western country that was explicitly founded on racial oppression. Today, as in the past, this oppression is not a minor addition to U.S. society's structure, but rather is systemic across all major institutions.
--Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism
It is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of high maturity, to rise to the level of self-criticism.
--Martin Luther King Jr.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.
--President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 2009
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Changing the structure and rules of the global economy will require a mass movement based on messages of compassion, justice, and equality, as well as collaborative and democratic processes…If we stay positive, inclusive, and democratic, we have a truly historic opportunity to build a global movement for social justice.
--Medea Benjamin
The future will have no pity for those who, possessing the exceptional privilege to speak words of truth to the oppressor, instead take refuge in cynical indifference and cold complicity.
--Frantz Fanon
The history of tomorrow is the struggle, which has already begun, between conquerors and artists...Political action and artistic creation are the two faces of the same revolt against the world's disorder, the same desire to give the world unity.
--Albert Camus (1947)
For me the process of art and the idea of political freedom have always been inextricably mixed, not always theoretically, but since I can remember, in feeling....Within the human psyche…poetry is a secret way through which we can restore authenticity to ourselves.
This is perhaps why poetry has been so important to feminism and the feminist movement. Language itself had made us invisible to ourselves. The very vocabulary we inherited locked us into a diminished state of being.
--Susan Griffin, " Poetry as a Way of Knowledge"
When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.
--John Russell
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