Stuart Wechsler

“Democrats regained, for the time being at least, a majority, and liberals have had time to contemplate what they see as the deeply uncultured mob that trounced them in 2004. They have watched panel discussions on PBS. They have argued about where political strategy went wrong. But the one thing the thinking left and urban liberals have not done is tread the soil of the Goth—subject themselves to the unwashed working-class America, to that churchgoing, hunting and fishing, Bud Light–drinking, provincial America.”
― Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant

“Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power...Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.”
― Abraham Heschel

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
― Frederick Douglass