I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
– Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Read More »It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. Even though you can’t expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That’s morality, that’s religion, that’s art, that’s life.
– Phil Ochs, as quoted in The Complete Phil Ochs: Chords of Fame (1978) by Almo publications
Read More »I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. …
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? …
And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. …
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
– Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (as found in the book Sister Outsider)
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
[…]
Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together. But for that kind of wider perception we need time, patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
Humanism is centred upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and authority. […] humanism is the only, and I would go as far as to say the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
– Edward W. Said (1935 – 2003), Palestinian American academic, literary critic and political activist, author of Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Out of Place: A memoir (1999), Reflections on exile and other essays (2000) and many others.
[Source: A window on the world, 2003, on guardian.org – text adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Orientalism, published by Penguin]
And I say to myself: a moon will rise from my darkness.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Utopia is not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all too brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else. Is there an instinct, a very ancient instinct, for breathing in unison? The ultimate utopia, that.
– Susan Sontag, In America
The world is a terrible place for sensitive people but the closer we come to losing our minds, the harder we’ll work to keep them.
– Kae Tempest, Hold Your Own
And the dealer wants you thinking
That it’s either black or white
Thank God it’s not that simple
In my secret life
– Leonard Cohen, In My Secret Life (Ten New Songs, 2001)
Out of everything he wrote, the lyrics above might seem like a weird choice. But the truths we connect to in songs and art can sometimes be so simply put and still not lose the strength.
What are some of the verses of songs that touch and inspire you the most?
Feel free to share it with us in the comments below or on our social media channels.
So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
– George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art Manifesto (1969)
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