Dennis Fischman

“Reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” Douglass, amazingly, summed up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years