Leslie

“How do you ruin a people? Is it with fire? Is it with bullets? You can drag a man through the street tied to the back of a horse. You can incinerate a village. Can line families up in rows against a brick wall and fell them, one by one, like a forest. But all it takes is one survivor, and the story lives on. One survivor to carry the poems and the songs, the prayers, the sorrows. It isn’t just taking a life that destroys a people. It’s taking their history.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“They say pain can be passed in the blood. A sorrow great enough can alter an ancestral line, can make itself visible in the body even generations later, even once the name of the sorrow is forgotten. How long does it take for the body to realize it is safe? Does it ever?”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“Who gets remembered in the great American experiment? Who is forgotten? What becomes of those whose names are dust? Tell me this country ain’t haunted.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. In the chill climate in which we live, we must go against the prevailing wind. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.”
― Thurgood Marshall