Jordan West

“There was nothing new that could happen and he didn't understand why more people could not come to this realization. The same things are born and the same things die and the same river flows and the same fire burns. The same hearts break and the same fools rise. There was a gift in such knowledge and he allowed it to carry him without regard to provocation or concern for consequence as if he was only a chess piece being moved about the world.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Lay Your Armor Down

“POLITICS IS THE ART OF CONTROLLING YOUR ENVIRONMENT"

This is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks "it doesn't matter who's President" has never been drafted and sent off to die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World - or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on private property - or been hounded by the IRS for purely political resasons - or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts waiting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness: Modern History from the ESPN.com Sports Desk

“Our teachers and troubadours stuffed our minds with the tales of our fathers - Aristotle and Arthur, Christ and Chretien. Our swordmasters swelled our thews with the steps and strikes of our fathers' fathers. Our thoughts tread again the paths first cut by our forebears' minds. Thus we hop and hew in the image of our fathers, and the fathers of our fathers. How might we then count ourselves new men, and not but shades of elder days, fleshed afresh in gaudy youth? Do we martyr ourselves upon knighthood's altar of our volition, or does some greater mind print its thumb upon us and so mold us into familar shape? What will lies within? What choice? Are we men, or the echoes of men, seeded once and springing forever from the same tired earth, watered forevermore by chivalry's iron unguent?”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy

“I will state flatly that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.
Well, then, for the sake of one's sanity, one simply ceases trying to make them hear. If they think that things are more important than people--and they do--well, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things.”
― James Baldwin