Norman Cohen

“course if we choose to use a language comprehensible only to law and economics graduates it will be easy to prove that the masses need to have their life run for them. But if we speak in plain language, if we are not obsessed with a perverse determination to confuse the issues and exclude the people, then it will be clear that the masses comprehend all the finer points and every artifice. Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer's intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language's endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand. And if you think they can be dispensed with, that on the contrary they would be more of a nuisance to the smooth running of the many private and limited companies whose aim is to push them further into misery, then there is no more to be said.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Between 1971 and 2013, Conservative Judaism went from being the denominational home of 41 percent of American Jews to representing only 18 percent. Along the way, the career of Jeffrey Myers would suffer the same fortunes as the movement.”
― Mark Oppenheimer, Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood

“The duty of the colonized subject, who has not yet arrived at a political consciousness or a decision to reject the oppressor, is to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him. This is where non-cooperation or at least minimal cooperation clearly materializes. These observations regarding the colonized's disposition to work could also be applied to the colonized's attitude toward the colonizer's laws, his taxes, and the colonial system. Under a colonial regime, gratitude, sincerity, and honor are hollow words.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there’s a war. When other people start thinking about you, it’s to figure out how to torture you, that and nothing else. The bastards want to see you bleeding, otherwise they’re not interested! Princhard was dead right. In the shadow of the slaughterhouse, you don’t speculate very much about your future, you think about loving in the days you have left, because there’s no other way of forgetting your body that’s about to be skinned alive.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night