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Truth: Grace Lee Boggs

 

Grace Lee Boggs 

Activist, Community Leader, Author

 (1915 - )

People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.

 

Additional Quotes by Grace Lee Boggs

  • I believe that we are at the point now, in the United States, where a movement is beginning to emerge. I think that the calamity, the quagmire of the Iraq war, the outsourcing of jobs, the drop-out of young people from the education system, the monstrous growth of the prison-industrial complex, the planetary emergency, which we are engulfed at the present moment, is demanding that instead of just complaining about these things, instead of just protesting about these things, we begin to look for, and hope for, another way of living. And I think that-- that's where the movement-- I-- I see a movement beginning to emerge, 'cause I see hope beginning to trump despair.
  •  The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity?
  • In order to grapple with the interacting and seemingly intractable questions of today’s society, we need to see ourselves not mainly as victims but as new men and women who, recognizing the sacredness in ourselves and in others, can view love and compassion not as some “sentimental weakness but as the key that somehow unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.” (Martin Luther King)
  • How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing? Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs didn’t even exist? Work, as distinguished from Labor, was done to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, and nurture cooperation.
  • What will move us to care for our biosphere instead of using our technological mastery to increase the speed at which we are making it uninhabitable?
  • How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?
  • Can we build an America in which people of all races and ethnicities live together in harmony, and Euro-Americans, in particular, celebrate their role as one among many minorities constituting the multiethnic majority?
  • How do we achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic, military, and cultural domination?
  • These are the times to grow our souls. Each of us is called upon to embrace the conviction that despite the powers and principalities bent on commodifying all our human relationships, we have the power within us to create the world anew.
  • We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.
  • We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.
  • People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.
  • Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future...A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future...It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have - creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.
  • I think we're not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments.
  • [P]eople think of evolution mainly in terms of anatomical changes. I think that we have to think of evolution in terms of-- very elemental human changes. and so, we're evolving both through our knowledge and through our experiences to another a stage of human-- humankind. So, revolution and evolution are no longer so separate.
  • Do something local. Do something real, however, small. And don't-- don't diss the political things, but understand their limitations.
  • It takes a whole lot of things. It takes people doing things. It takes people talking about things. It takes dialogue. It takes changing the whole lot of ways by which we think.
  • I think we have to rethink the concept of "leader." 'Cause "leader" implies "follower." And, so many-- not so many, but I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.
  • You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.
 
Biography
 
 A prominent activist her entire adult life, Grace Lee was born in Rhode Island in 1915, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She studied at Barnard College and Bryn Mawr, receiving her Ph.D. in 1940. Her studies in philosophy and the writings of Marx, Hegel, and Mead led not to a life in academia teaching others to question themselves and those in power, but rather to a lifetime of social activism and collaboration with others.

For Lee, it began in Chicago, where she joined the movement for tenants’ rights, and then the Workers Party, a splinter group of the Socialist Workers Party. In these associations, as well as in her involvement with the 1941 March on Washington, Lee found her niche as an activist in the African-American community, focusing specifically on marginalized groups such as women and people of color. In 1953, Lee married black auto worker and activist James Boggs and moved to Detroit, where she remains an activist today, writing columns for the Michigan Citizen. James died in 1993.

Grace Lee Boggs embraces a philosophy of constant questioning – not just of who we are as individuals, but of how we relate to those in our community and country, to those in other countries, and to the local and global environment. Boggs has rejected the idea of the stereotypical radical as one who only views capitalist society as something to be done away with, believing more that “you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.” It is in smaller groups, working together, that positive social change can happen, rather than in larger revolutions where one group of power simply changes position with another. That is why, in 1992, she and her husband founded Detroit Summer, a community movement bringing people of all races, cultures, and ages together to rebuild Detroit - a city Boggs has described as “a symbol of the end of industrial society…buildings that were once architectural marvels, like the Book Cadillac hotel and Union Station, lie in ruins…and in most neighborhoods people live behind triple-locked doors and barred windows.” Working literally from the ground up, Detroit Summer’s activities include planting community gardens in vacant lots, creating huge murals on buildings, and renovating houses. There is a Center set up in honor of Grace Lee and James Boggs,http://www.boggscenter.org, which fosters their ideas and encourages independent thinking and leadership. You can read several of her speeches and columns on its website.

 

Truth: Jeannette Rankin


Jeannette Rankin 

Suffragette, Congresswoman, Pacifist

(1880-1973)

Women remind me of the cows on our ranch in Montana. A cow has a calf and after a while a man comes along and takes the calf away. She bawls for a while, then goes on and has another calf. If we had 10,000 women willing to go to prison, that would end the war. We’ve had 10,000 women sit back and let their sons be killed.

 

Additional Quotes by Jeannette Rankin

  • As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.
  • I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.
  • If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.
  • It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail.
  • Killing more people won't help matters.
  • Men and women are like right and left hands; it doesn't make sense not to use both.
  • Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy.
  • There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.
  • War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.
  • We're half the people; we should be half the Congress.
  • What one decides to do in crisis depends on one's philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn't any philosophy in crises, others make the decision.

 

Biography

The eldest child of a Montana rancher and a schoolteacher, Jeannette Rankin would vote in Congress for peace before most American women could vote anywhere. After graduating from Montana State University, Rankin taught school, designed furniture, and tried social work. Then women’s suffrage ignited her passion, and she became legislative secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her efforts led to Montana women winning the right to vote in 1914, five years before the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed that right nationally.

In 1916 Rankin was elected to Congress as a Republican. Just four days into her term, she drew national attention by voting (along with fifty-five men) against entering World War I. ““I want to stand with my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she said. She later voted for suffrage, civil liberties, equal pay, and child welfare, but her anti-war vote kept her from being re-elected in 1920.

Working for peace became Rankin’s life. “There can be no compromise with war,” she wrote. “[I]t cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense, for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.” She held leadership roles in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and other groups, and she later traveled to India to learn directly from Gandhi.

In 1940, Rankin ran for Congress on an isolationist platform, and Montana again sent her to Washington. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she was the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan. Although editor William Allen White disagreed with her position, he wrote, “Probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it.”

In 1968 and 1970, days before her ninetieth birthday, Rankin returned to the nation’s capital to lead marches in protest of the Vietnam War.


 

Truth: Stan Goff

Stan Goff 

Author, Veteran, Anti-war Activist, Feminist

(1951-  )

The physical reality is that "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron. A soft energy landing from the last two hundred years of development will require massive conservation, especially by the overdeveloped countries, and that can only happen in a nongrowth ( and therefore noncapitalist ) society. The choice is now becoming either capitalism or humanity.

 

Additional Quotes by Stan Goff

  • We need to ask ourselves, however, what sowing the winds of war abroad will reap at home.
  • The precursors of fascism -- militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization -- are ascendant in America today.
  • In American society right now, with the immigration hysteria fueled by faux populists like CNN's execrable Lou Dobbs, there is a growing wave of xenophobia that has begun to legitimate vigilantism.
Biography
 
Stan Goff grew up in a conservative, staunchly anti-communist family, which informed his early political ideas. In 1970, he joined the Army, which he would do at several other points in his life. Goff retired in 1996 as a Special Forces Master Sergeant. During his tenure, he was sent to places such as Vietnam, Haiti, Panama, Colombia, and Somalia, participating in part of several different military attachments. Goff would later write that his time spent in Latin America shifted his politics to the left. His experiences, particularly in Haiti, are recounted in his 2000 book Hideous Dream – A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti.

In between terms in the military, Goff studied literature and philosophy at Garland Community College, Henderson State College, and the University of Arkansas at Monticello. Soon after retirement, Goff began a career in activism, studying Marxism and briefly joining the Communist Party USA. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Goff became active as a speaker against an invasion. His status as a veteran gave him credence and popularity with anti-war activists. In 2003, Goff wrote “Bring ‘Em On?” for the online journal Counterpunch. It was a response to the phrase “Bring ‘em on” uttered by President Bush regarding Iraqi guerrillas, and in the article he compared the Iraq war to his experience in Vietnam. He wrote of being told by a fellow veteran that “All Vietnamese were the enemy…this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was given to the American Public for the war was not true.” He ended by stating that President Bush’s “legitimacy has been eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all.” The popularity of this article led to his meeting with other veterans and anti-war activists, and soon to the formation of the organization Bring Them Home Now. His 2004 book Full Spectrum Disorder – The Military in the New American Century, critiques US foreign policy. According to the publisher, Goff “depicts the new ‘American Empire’ as over-reliant on technology, ignorant of the lessons of history, and backward in the stereotyping of other countries.”

Recently, Goff has included feminism in his studies and writings, particularly how it pertains to war. This re-examination comes together in Sex and War, where he argues that war is not an instinct of man, but rather, “men are made into killers by governments, corporations, and systems of power.” His latest book is a compilation of essays, titled Energy War.

Stan Goff has an extremely active voice on the Internet. He is a frequent contributor on the blog The Huffington Post. He also maintains his own blog called Feral Scholar, and a website at http://home.igc.org/~sherrynstan/ . He is also a principal member of the website Insurgent American. It is a website describing itself as a “practical strategic resource,” and defining insurgents as “pretty much anyone who disagrees with the dominant consensus and does even a little bit more than talk about it…we exist to promote a fundamental transformation of power relations within our society.”

 

Truth: Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan

Mother, Anti-War Activist, Peace Advocate, Author  

(1957 -  )

George, your reckless and wanton foreign policies killed my son, Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan, in the illegal and unjust war on Iraq. Helping to bring about your political downfall will be the most  noble accomplishment of my life, and it will bring justice for my son and the hundreds of other brave Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis your lies have killed.

 

Additional Quotes by Cindy Sheehan

  • 58% of the American public are with us. We're preaching to the choir, but the choir's not singing, if all of the 58% started singing, this war would end.
  •  I admire President Chavez for his strength to resist the United States. Instead, Bush is waging a war of terrorism against the world.
  •  I believe that any candidate who supports the war should not receive our support. It doesn't matter if they're Senator Clinton or whoever.
  •  I was told my son was killed in the war on terror. He was killed by George Bush's war of terror on the world.
  • I would love to support Hillary for president if she would come out against the travesty in Iraq. But I don't think she can speak out against the occupation because she supports it.
  • I'm just so honored that the universe chose me to be the spark that has set off a raging inferno.
  • I've always admired President Chavez for standing up to imperialism and the meddling of the American government in South America.
  • If we stick together as an American people we can bring down the war criminals that are running our country right now.
  • It's up to us, the people, to break immoral laws, and resist. As soon as the leaders of a country lie to you, they have no authority over you. These maniacs have no authority over us. And they might be able to put our bodies in prison, but they can't put our spirits in prison.
  • My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don't owe you a penny.
  • So what really gets me is these chickenhawks, who sent our kids to die, without ever serving in a war themselves. They don't know what it's all about.
  • The war in Iraq will end, our troops will come home, Bush will be impeached and he will be brought to justice.
  • We can't let somebody rise to the top who will pardon these war criminals. Because they need to go to prison for what they've done in this world. We can't have a pardon. They need to pay for what they've done.
  • We haven't been happy with the way the war has been handled. The president has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached.
  • We really need to stop the imperialist tendencies of countries like the United States and Great Britain.
  • What is the 'noble cause' for which you sent our country to war.
  • When I was growing up, it was 'Communists'. Now it's 'Terrorists'. So you always have to have somebody to fight and be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, guns, and bullets and everything.


Biography

Cindy Lee Miller Sheehan was born on July 10, 1957. A longtime resident of California, she is one of the strongest, most personal and persistent voices in the movement against the war in Iraq. Patrick and Cindy Sheehan had four children – Casey, Carly, Andy, and Janey. Casey was the eldest. The whole family was active in the church – Cindy was once a Youth Minister. They were a tightly knit family, which, according to Cindy, “did everything together.”

Cindy’s world changed forever when, on a mission on April 4, 2004 to help other troops in Sadr City, Spc. Casey Sheehan was tragically killed. She and other military families met with President George W. Bush in June of 2004. By October, Cindy decided her son’s death would spur her into action. She wrote, “I was ashamed that I hadn’t tried to stop the war before Casey died…Well, I now felt that if I couldn’t make a difference, I would at least try.” Her quest to end the war, bring soldiers home, and hold politicians responsible for the decisions that sent the troops to Iraq initially, has been indefatigable.

During the January 2005 Presidential Inauguration of George W. Bush, Cindy was speaking at the opening of Eyes Wide Open: the Human Cost of War. The American Friends Service Committee had created a traveling exhibition of combat boots, each pair representing a U.S. military casualty. From this experience, the idea for Gold Star Families for Peace was born. In an interview, Cindy describes the organization as one that “I founded in January 2005. When a mom has a child killed in a war, she becomes a Gold Star Mom. Well, we expanded the idea to include all family members because an entire family is affected because of the death.” It is a support and activist group, and can be found here at http://www.gsfp.org/ .

In early August of 2005, Cindy, or “Peace Mom”, as she has come to be called, camped in a ditch near President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. She was requesting a second personal meeting with the president, who had declared that the fallen soldiers had died for a “noble cause”. Cindy wanted to know exactly what that cause was, and to demand an immediate end to what she viewed as an unjust and immoral war. So many people, activists, and celebrities stopped by or joined in to show their support, that her somewhat spontaneous demonstration became known as “Camp Casey”. A few days later, a neighbor offered the Camp Casey participants some land to use as their base. Camp Casey has become a regular protest event, gathering when President Bush is in Crawford for holidays and vacations. Cindy has purchased land where the protesters can camp.

Between Camp Casey operations, Cindy has traveled extensively, meeting with people and leaders from all over the world, and been featured in many protests and rallies. She is credited with having revived the anti-war protest, and providing a name and face for the peace and justice movement. Her published works include Not One More Mother’s Child – an account of her first year of activism, Dear President Bush – a collection of writings and speeches, and Peace Mom: A Mother’s Journey through Heartache to Activism. 

 

Truth: David Rovics

David Rovics

American Singer, Songwriter, Political & Social Activist

"The Musical Voice of the Progressive Movement"

(1967-  )

If you knew that the earth was dying/  If they said this on the news…/ If you could see the ice caps melting…/ If you knew the bombs were falling/ If they showed them hit the ground/ If you could see the bodies flying/ If you could hear the sound…/ If every time we went to war/ To fight our evil foes/ they told you we were really fighting/ For the good of CEOs…/ If you knew that the whole planet / Depended on what you do…/ What if you knew?

 

Biography

David Rovics grew up in a family of classical musicians in Wilton, Connecticut, and became a fan of populist regimes early on. By the early 90's he was a full-time busker in the Boston subways and by the mid-90's he was traveling the world as a professional flat-picking rabble-rouser. These days David lives with his family in Portland, Oregon and tours regularly on four continents, playing for audiences large and small at cafes, pubs, universities, churches, union halls and protest rallies. He has shared the stage with a veritable of who's who of the left in two dozen countries, and has had his music featured on Democracy Now!, BBC, Al-Jazeera and other networks. His essays are published regularly on CounterPunch elsewhere, and the 200+ songs he makes available for free on the web have been downloaded more than a million times. Most importantly, he's really good. He will make you laugh, he will make you cry, he will make the revolution irresistible.


 

Truth: Bill Moyers

 

Bill Moyers 

Broadcast Journalist, Public Official, Baptist Minister

(1934 –  )

The framers of our nation never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing, and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests — and to the ideology of market economics. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.


Additional Quotes by Bill Moyers

  • As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.
  •  Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
  • Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.
  • Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn't.
  • For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
  • I own and operate a ferocious ego.
  • Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
  • Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.
  • Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.
  • The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.
  • There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians - they stay bought.
  • This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.
  • We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
  • We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.
  • What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does.
  • When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.

 

Biography

Hearing Bill Moyers described as “insightful, erudite, impassioned, brilliant,” as “a man who chooses his words carefully because he values and respects the power of language and the importance of his own integrity,” you’d never guess that he could do this while working in television.

Born in Oklahoma, Moyers grew up in Texas, where he received a journalism B.A. in 1956 from the University of Texas in Austin and then a divinity degree in 1959 from the Southwestern Theological Seminary. For most of the 1960s he alternated between working for the Peace Corps (as a director of public affairs and deputy director) and for fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson (as a personal assistant to the vice-president, then as a special assistant and press secretary to the president.)

Since then, TV has been Moyers’s main focus. In 1971, following a few years as the publisher of Newsday, he began almost 35 years of producing hundreds of hours of television interviews for various series broadcast primarily on PBS. Over the years Moyers earned more than 30 Emmy awards and 10 Peabody awards for his work creating shows like A Walk Through the 20th Century, The Power of Myth (with Joseph Campbell), A World of Ideas, and Healing and the Mind. Some of these series, converted into print, also became best-selling books. He had become, a biographer wrote, “one of the few broadcast journalists who might be said to approach the stature of Edward R. Murrow.” Another called him “a gifted storyteller through words and images,” someone who “reveals to us the spiritual, emotional, and historical sides of our culture.”

In December 2004, Moyers announced his retirement from his final show, the national newsmagazine Now. Before retiring he said, “I believe democracy requires a ‘sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.” And, “Free and responsible government by popular consent just can’t exist without an informed public.”


 

Truth: Edward Said

Edward Sa 

Palestinian Activist, Literary Critic, Writer, Musician

  (1935-2003)

Part of the main plan of imperialism… is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past…What’s more truly frightening is the defacement, the mutilation, and ultimately the eradication of history in order to create…an order that is favorable to the United States.

 

Additional Quotes by Edward Said

  • I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause.
  •  I urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values, defintions, and cultures uncontested.
  •  For the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others.
  • Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.
  • Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

Biography

Edward Said was a teenager when Israeli forces captured West Jerusalem in 1948. His family fled with other Palestinian refugees to Cairo. He eventually attended Princeton and Harvard and settled in the U.S., where he became a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, a celebrated intellectual, and the leading advocate for Palestinian self-determination.

He wrote his first political essay, “The Arab Portrayed,” in response to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s declaration in 1969 that “There are no Palestinians.” Said writes that he took on “the slightly preposterous challenge of disproving her, of beginning to articulate a history of loss and dispossession that had to be extricated, minute by minute, word by word, inch by inch.”

That piece launched a lifetime of writing and activism. Said championed the rights of the Palestinian people to determine their own future—while insisting that Palestinians acknowledge the persecution and genocide suffered by the Jews. “[T]he struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial,” he wrote.

The most influential of Said’s many books is Orientalism (1978), which denounces “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture,” arguing that these biases have served as a justification for the West’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East and Asia.

Said’s activism exiled him from Israel and Palestine for most of his life and provoked criticism in this country. He has been called everything from “the professor of terror” to a Nazi, and his office at Columbia was set on fire. But he persevered, publishing regularly in The Nation, the Arabic newspaper al-Hayat in London, and many other publications. His enduring legacy is the courage to say the most difficult things to the most difficult people in the most difficult circumstances.

 

Truth: Eleanor Roosevelt


Eleanor Roosevelt 

Humanitarian, Social Reformer

(1884-1962)

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

 

Additional Quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt

  • A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
  • A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.
  • Actors are one family over the entire world.
  • Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.
  • Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
  • Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
  • As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.
  • Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.
  • Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.
  • Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
  • Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry is own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
  • Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
  • Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
  • Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
  • Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.
  • Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.
  • I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.
  • I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
  • I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
  • I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Biography

Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City, the daughter of a society beauty and an adored, but detached, father, and the niece of the former president, Theodore Roosevelt. As a young woman she seemed to prefer service as a volunteer in a Settlement House to the usual diversions of the socially prominent.

Her marriage to a distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, in 1905 brought her a large family to raise and, in 1921, a disabled husband to care for. With her encouragement, her husband returned to politics, becoming, first, Governor of New York and, in 1933 when the country was paralyzed by economic depression, President.

Although her husband's position provided her with a platform not available to most reformers, Eleanor Roosevelt's use of her opportunities to promote better housing, more humane working conditions and racial justice was distinctly her own. She wrote a daily newspaper column, spoke on the radio and traveled the country to observe and report about the plight of the forgotten poor. During World War II she made many trips overseas on behalf of her country and, at war's end and after the death of her husband, she was a delegate to the United Nations and, in 1946, became chairman of the Commission on Human Rights.

Eleanor Roosevelt's efforts to help the powerless often invited scorn and cruel mockery from those who did not share her vision of social justice. She wrote in her newspaper column, “My Day,” in 1937: “Without equality there can be no democracy.” When equality's enemies ridiculed her activism, she said, ”Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you'll be criticized anyway.”

 

 

Truth: Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. 
 
Clergyman, Civil Rights Leader, Writer, Human Rights Activist
 
(1929-1968)

Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. 

 

Additional Quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. 

  • A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. 
  •  A lie cannot live. 
  • A man can't ride your back unless it's bent. 
  • A man who won't die for something is not fit to live. 
  • A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan. 
  • A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. 
  • A right delayed is a right denied. 
  • A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. 
  • A riot is the language of the unheard. 
  • All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. 
  • All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. 
  • Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. 
  • An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. 
  • An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. 
  • At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love. 
  • Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. 
  • Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. 
  • Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them. 
  • Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. 
  • Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. 
  • Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. 
  • He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. 
  • History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.  
  • Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. 
  •  Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. 
  •  I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good. 
  •  I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. 
  • I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. 
  • I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. 
  • I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. 
  • I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. 
  • I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word. 
  • I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
  • I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. 
  • I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law. 
  • If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

 

Biography

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. He completed his formal education with degrees from Morehouse College, Crozier Theological Seminary and Boston University (Ph. D. in Systematic Theology, 1955). While serving as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, he led the boycott which resulted in the desegregation of that city’s bus system. His resolve in the face of threats to his safety as well as that of his family, his conviction that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and his ability to write and speak with extraordinary power and clarity brought him to national prominence as a leader of the movement to achieve racial justice in America.


He studied the writings and example of Mohandas K. Gandhi in India who powerfully influenced his philosophy of non-violence. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King said: “Non-violence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.” Like Gandhi, King also understood the strategic value of non-violence “We have neither the techniques nor the numbers to win a violent campaign.” His commitment to non-violence led him to oppose the American war in Viet Nam.

Like Henry David Thoreau, Dr. King believed in the necessity of resisting unjust laws with civil disobedience. As a leader of many demonstrations in support of the rights of African-Americans, he was subject to frequent arrest and imprisonment. His Letters from a Birmingham Jail (1963) was a call to conscience directed primarily at American religious leaders.

When a fellow civil rights worker was killed after the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, King said: “If physical death is the price that some must pay to save us and our white brothers from eternal death of the spirit then no sacrifice could be more redemptive.” Martin Luther King’s own redemptive sacrifice was exacted by an assassin’s bullets on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.


 

Truth: Maja Kazazic

 

 Maja Kazazic 

War Survivor, Inspirational Speaker, Entrepreneur

 (1977-  )

My life has helped me realize and understand the power of people. When we pull together we can make anything happen --- even world peace. We are all connected, our lives overlap, our stories are intertwined, and our fates are shared.

Everyone gave me what they could, and together it formed a quilt of support that kept me going in those early difficult months. 

Biography

Maja Kazazic made this statement in 1993 after being hospitalized for a critical injury. Although suffering greatly at the time, she was able to create a metaphorical quilt from her personal story, transforming scraps and fragments of her trauma into a unified, beautiful whole.  

The fashioning of Maja Kazazic’s life’ quilt began in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 1970s where she enjoyed a halcyon childhood. She excelled in school and was passionate about becoming the best soccer player in Mostar as well as a professional athlete. Along with her parents and younger brother, Maja was surrounded by a large and close-knit family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who all lived within walking distance of each other and gathered frequently to share coffee, food, laughter and music, all of which was abundant at the time. The first 14 years of her life were not that different from those of teenagers around the world. As Maja says, “My friends wore T-shirts and jeans, watched ‘90210’ and ‘Baywatch,’ and listened to American music, like Billy Joel.”

All that changed very quickly when the international armed conflict, the Bosnian War, came to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. In mid-1993 Maja was critically injured by a mortar shell, which killed six of her friends. Her lower legs and left hand were severely damaged, and a great deal of shrapnel invaded her body causing rapid blood loss. 

Moments later she was taken to a so-called hospital, which was in a basement where there were no real doctors, no medicine, and limited supplies. After a week, infection set in and in order to save her life a dentist  was called in to amputate her left leg. Devastated, Maja’s first thought was that she would never be able to play soccer again. But, she had no choice. 

After two months, Maja was taken by Sally Becker, a British aid worker,to Frankfurt, Germany where she received the care she needed to survive. In September of 1993, through their Children of War Rescue Project, Veterans for Peace brought Maja to a hospital in Cumberland, Maryland. “Its citizens embraced me. Every group in town donated what I needed to live and what I needed to survive. The president of the hospital and my surgeons and nurses donated my medical care. Church groups provided housing, food and clothing and gave me what they could.” 

Alone in a foreign land, not knowing English or American customs, the most difficult part for 16 year old Maja was being away from the support of her family and friends. Sometimes she wished she had died with her friends, but she learned to “take life on life’s terms.”

Over the next few months, she had several operations a week on her legs and doctors did skin grafts all over her body. Becoming fluent in English, she was eventually well enough to go to high school, even though she started out in a wheelchair dragging an I.V. After months of physical therapy to learn to walk again, she began using a prosthetic leg which at first was difficult and painful. 

Having graduated from St. Francis University with a degree in psychology, Maja relocated to the Gulf Coast of Florida and almost immediately got a job as a web analyst at an insurance brokerage,which led to her launching her own website development company. Hundreds of surgeries allowed her to play the occasional round of golf or set of tennis, but walking remained very difficult and painful. Longing to return to the athletic life she once lived, Maja was constantly challenged by her imperfect prosthesis.

On one of her frequent visits to Clearwater Marine Aquarium, she observed a young dolphin, Winter, who had a prosthetic tail, which enabled her to swim like a normal dolphin. Maja contacted the company that made Winter’s tail and within ten days had a new prosthetic which enabled her to play golf and tennis, ride her bike and walk long distances, pain free.

As her website business grows, Maja is giving back to the people and the country that took her in.  She created One Story One World ( www.OneStoryOneWorld.com ), a website to publish and read true stories of everyday heros, believing that by “swapping stories with others, we remember that we are all connected... by the challenges we face as we try to live our lives to the fullest. A certified amputee peer counselor, she helps recent amputees see that there is life after limb loss, instilling in them a determination to succeed and the will to overcome any obstacle. She volunteers at Camp No Limits for amputee children and Clearwater Marine Aquarium. She talks to church groups, school groups and business groups about the twists and turns her life has taken and about spirits of humans to rebuild and recreate their life quilts.

 

 

 

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