#civil

[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement. ↗

— Gail Collins

#ella-baker #feminism #grassroots-organizing #leadership #naacp

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan. ↗

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

#continues #death #installment #installment plan #men

She is still less civilized than man, largely because she has not been educated. ↗

— W. L. George

#been #civilized #educated #largely #less

if we don’t rebel, if we’re not physically in an active rebellion, then it’s spiritual death. ↗

— Chris Hedges

#death

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#disease #history #death

The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. ↗

— Herman Melville

#violence #war #white-people #death

Western Civilization was responsible for a paradigm shift in history. It created the industrial and scientific revolutions that enabled the birth of a transportation, communications and knowledge revolution unprecedented in the 5 billion year history of this planet. Unfortunately this revolution took place amidst a moral vacuum at the very top of the power structure. It is as if a three year old child had been given control over both a candy story and a shotgun. He was able to use the shotgun to get all the candy he wanted but he had no idea what to do next. Whenever somebody tried to tell him too much candy was bad for him, he shot the person who said that. ↗

— Benjamin Fulford

#western-civilization #communication

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching. ↗

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

#act #civil #civil society #heart #liberal

These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will." [Dissenting, Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 343 (1966)] ↗

— William O. Douglas

#encroachment #freedom #government #liberty #privacy

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#greed #power #silence #wasteland #dreams