Jay Knioum

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage... and yet when the future digs us from the past they won't care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they’ll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they’ll dig up too, but perhaps they’ll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death.”
― Vincent Price, I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.
~Maya Angelou
Remember this because it will happen many times in your life. When people show you who they are the first time believe them. Not the 29th. time. When a man doesn't call you back the first time, when you are mistreated the first time, when someone shows you lack of integrity or dishonesty the first time, know that this will be followed many many other times, that will some point in life come back to haunt or hurt you. Live your life in truth. Don't pretend to be someone you're not. You will survive anything if you live your life from the point of view of truth.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“By the end of 2014, UNHCR would record close to 60 million forcibly displaced people, 8 million more than in the previous year. Half of those were children. Every day that year, on average, 42,500 people became refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced, a fourfold increase in just four years.”
― Melissa Fleming, A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival