Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”
― Franz Kafka

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Self-assertion may deceive the ignorant for a time; but when the noise dies away, we cut open the drum, and find it was emptiness that made the music.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
― Jane Jacobs

“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“We place the poorest segment of society behind bars.”
― Thomas Mathiesen, Prison on Trial

“I saw the prison as an institution within which a proportion of the unproductive population of late capitalist societies could be housed, controlled and conveniently forgotten.”
― Thomas Mathiesen, Prison on Trial

“The future throws a bridge toward the past, over the gaping abyss of capitalist non-culture.”
― Michael Löwy, On Changing the World: Essays in Marxist Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin

“The revolution has to be self-liberation.”
― Michael Löwy, On Changing the World: Essays in Marxist Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin

“How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
― Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

“A thought will color a world for us.”
― Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

“Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what -- not who -- we are.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories “prove” that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma