Fred C. Harris

“What will I die with in my hand?
A paintbrush (for houses), an M15
a hammer or ax, a book a gavel,
a candlestick
tiptoeing upstairs.
What will I hold or will I
be caught with this usual thing
that I want to be my heart but
it is my brain and I turn it
over and over and over.”
― Jim Harrison, Outlyer and Ghazals

“In 1968, the Tet offensive in Vietnam took the lives of thousands of GIs and made it clear to a lot of Americans that we were fighting an unwinnable war.  Meanwhile the people of Prague, Czechoslovakia rose up against their Soviet oppressors and the United States did nothing to help them, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, there were riots in the streets of major cities, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured the police beatings of peaceful anti-war demonstrators.  Oh! and yes, as if that wasn't enough, Richard Nixon was elected President.  Otherwise things were fine.”
― Ernest Cataldo, A Life On Beacon Hill: An Unauthorized History of Phillips Street

“The American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as “a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
― Jonathan Taplin, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life

“In the eyes of posterity, the success of the United States as a civilized society will be largely judged by the creative activities of its citizens in art, architecture, literature, music, and the sciences.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House