john a. powell

“We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other – male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so very often do I. But none of us can do anything about it. James Baldwin, “Here Be Dragons”
― John A. Powell, Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

“Our desires are insatiable. We seek from the limited the unlimited. We must fail. Our insatiability is a third incurable defect in human life.”
― Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Religion of the Future

“Perhaps we are by nature no more Hobbesian brute than caring altruist. As Erving Goffman once quipped, “Universal human nature is not a very human thing.” I propose this variation: Uniform human nature is not a very human thing. Our nature is different in different situations. What is universal is our vast potential to behave in such diverse ways. As the anthropologist Clifford”
― Geoffrey L. Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides

“there is going to be a victory over human incompleteness and limitation, it has to be a social project and not an individual one.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death