Mark

“Waldemar made a big sentimental scene with me before he left. He begged me to come with them. I refused. Tears came into his eyes. "We Aryans have to stand together," he said.

I am sure he said this without thinking. That's the disgusting power of propaganda: the Nazis have scattered such millions of these poisonous words around that you are apt to find one of them unexpectedly inside your own mouth.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit

“All of these frameworks help us to understand why the Stonewall Riots occurred when and where they did. Some aspects of the uprising were spontaneous and unprecedented. The homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s and its radicalization in the second half of the 1960s created the preconditions for revolt. The long history of bar-based resistance practices created a repertoire of rebellious responses. Other social movements provided revolutionary inspiration and influence. And the combination of heightened expectations and dashed hopes that many felt as the country transitioned from a period of liberal reform to one of conservative backlash—and that LGBT people experienced in the context of a new wave of police raids, violent killings, and local vigilantism—created an explosive situation that erupted on 28 June.”
― Marc Stein, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle