Beth Hanna

“Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

“scourge. To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“She’d given up so much and so little when she agreed to marry him, but he has been so fixated on having her that he had rarely stopped to consider what it would mean for her to allow herself to be had.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights”
― Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped