Andrew

“But, in the end, it is the threat of universal extinction hanging over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality and brings into devastating question the true meaning of man's history. We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God's name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do. if that is so, then it is time to replace Him-replace Him with what? And this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere in the West, from the streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the sidewalks off Harlem”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“One thing about pessimism is that it feels sane. Pessimists are those who can't be taken in, people who can't be fooled. I told you so. But it is also a habit of mind. It reconciles us to being powerless. It justifies detachment, indifference. It is even fear of having power....”
― Darryl Pinckney, Blackballed: Black American Voting Rights and U.S. Electoral Politics

“At every moment in history, oppression has been met with resistance. In every instance in which the State has consigned the vulnerable to the status of Nobody, The People have asserted that they are, in fact, Somebody. In doing so, they offer hope that another world is indeed possible, that empires eventually fall, and that freedom is loser than we think”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond