J. > J.'s Quotes

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“the work of changing, imagining, reimagining, building, and rebuilding the world—is on me, too, because it’s on all of us.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“As fires rage and sea levels rise in the coming years, we will be called upon to rescue one another again and again.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“Given how revocable and alterable these corporate-owned mediums are, we must consider, What would we do in the case of a major political event if social media were no longer at our disposal? And what about all the people we’re not connecting with in our own communities due to some people’s lack of social media use or the invisible constraints of corporate algorithms?”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.”
― Anais Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“the destruction of property is usually viewed as violent only if it disrupts profit or the maintenance of wealth. If food is destroyed because it cannot be sold while people go hungry, that is not considered violent under the norms of capitalism. If a person’s belongings are tossed on a sidewalk during an eviction and consequently destroyed, that is likewise not considered violent according to the norms of this society.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“It is not saviorism, but collectivity and solidarity, that will fuel our best efforts.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“under capitalism, “peace” is the maintenance of violence on the state’s terms.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.”
― Kelly Hayes

“When state actors refer to “peace,” they are really talking about order. And when they refer to “peaceful protest,” they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“Such is the perversion of “violence” under imperial and colonial rule: the maintenance of state-sanctioned violence is considered peaceful, while the disruption of those death-making processes is deemed violent.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“We urge organizers to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition (after all, you are reading right now) but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from—the stories, wisdom, hope, and imaginings of organizers who came before us.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because “violence” is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo.”
― Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“There are many layers of fear associated with this abandonment: fear of what would happen if the system no longer managed our lives, fear of being devoured by the system ourselves, fear that we cannot win, and perhaps most dauntingly, the fear that we cannot do any better than this, that our hopes to the contrary are the utopian dreams of childish idealists.”
― Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“It means having the courage to imagine, make mistakes, trust, listen, learn, think, and rethink; to resist punditry, pedestals, and perfection; to reject cynicism and embrace critical analysis; to plot; to hold on; to care and commune; to show up; to love.”
― Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“It's important to both ground ourselves in the here and now and also remember that the world is much bigger than this moment, bigger than us and our experience of it, and much bigger than we imagine when we are afraid”
― Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
― Elie Wiesel

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.”
― Ovid

“Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy