Andrea McDowell

“When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.”
― Vasily Grossman, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays

“Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail