Nick McDonell > Quotes

“He "had developed a trick in college for speaking with authority. He believed that breaking his argument into numbers forced people to pay attention. How you said something could be more important than what you said.”
― Nick McDonnell

“White Mike was a thinker, his teachers said. This is what he was thinking as he watched his mother's coffin being lowered into the ground.

You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.

That was what White Mike was thinking.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God…”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“What do you want? Because if you don’t want something, you’ve got nothing. You are adrift, you are washed away, and then buried under the snow and the shadows. And when, in the spring, the snow melts, no one will remember where you were frozen and buried, and you will no longer be anywhere.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she’s dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“Fiindca toata lumea are o notiune exacta despre cum trebuie sa traiasca..”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“...Be careful not to let too much understanding lead to too much forgiveness.”
― Nick McDonell, The Council of Animals

“In The Politics, Aristotle observed that citizens “who enjoy too many advantages—strength, wealth, connexions, and so forth—are both unwilling to obey, and ignorant how to obey, the law.”
― Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege

“Knowledge is more virtue than power.”
― Nick McDonell, The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars

“deeper lessons were confidence, poise in any context, what sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan calls ease. Old-fashioned exclusionary markers could in fact be a liability, in the same way an all-white classroom was. All the world was ours not because of what we excluded or inherited but because of our open-minded good manners and how hard we worked—which, all agreed, was very hard indeed. This superficial meritocracy masked, especially to ourselves, a profound entitlement.”
― Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege

“America has always been hypocritical and violent and still is, every time a white cop shoots a black child, every time an airstrike dismembers an Iraq child. But we have progressed, and perhaps even finer ideas can take root and grow around the central hope. There is no reason why advanced nonviolence can’t have its seeds on the wind, now. Why the turning of the cheek need be religious vacuity or naivete, rather than wobbly next step in a world where it is possible to translate languages instantly and yet remain skeptical of techno-utopia. If Americans are willing to accept greater risk in place of killing, others will take note, and follow, just as they have for two centuries of stumbling toward ideal and impossible equality.”
― Nick McDonell, The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars

“Forse le cose stanno così per tutti: semplicemente tu sei più debole, oppure meno fortunato, o hai visto qualcosa che tutti loro non hanno notato. Hai visto quanto è lunga la strada che ti aspetta, spazzata dal vento o bruciata dal sole cocente o ricoperta di neve, polvere o bitume, ammantata di tenebre o luminosa e chiara da farti chiudere gli occhi: comunque, in ogni caso, è spaventosamente vuota.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“A year or two later he would equate all this with amor fati when he finally got around to reading Nietzsche— the idea that you must love whatever comes, joy or sorrow, pain or happiness.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“What do you want? Because if you don't want something, you've got nothing.You are drift, you are washed away, and then buried under the snow and the shadows. And then when, in the spring, the snow melts, no one will remember where you were frozen and buried, and you will no longer be anywhere.”
― Nick McDonell

“Everyone knows what a penny dropped form the top of the Empire State Building can do. So if it started to rain pennies, millions of pennies, and these tiny bronze disks were streaking to the earth, catching the sunlight, the bronze rain would explode into the pavement and leave craters and you would run for cover. And there you would be, hiding under some overhand with everyone else who has run for cover, pressed in against the other bodies taking shelter. If it started raining money.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“The foreign policy establishment depends unabashedly on lies.”
― Nick McDonell, The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars

“Because really, when you get down on your knees on the pew, you’re just giving God a blow job.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“What do you want? Because if you don't want something, you've got nothing. You are adrift, you are washed away, and then buried under the snow and the shadows. And when, in the spring, the snow melts, no one will remember where you were frozen and buried, and you will no longer be anywhere.”
― Nick McDonell, Twelve

“Anand Giridharadas detailed in his book Winners Take All, the reality of this service was often self-enrichment: “All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change…. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases.”
― Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege