Samuel L

“She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around my ankles.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“Come to the edge," he said.
They said, "We are afraid."
Come to the edge," he said.
They came.
He pushed them...and they flew.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.”
― Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation