#soc

But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me! ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#human-rights #racism #slavery #social-justice #slavery

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are. ↗

— Robert B. Reich

#class-warfare #conservatism #economics #liberalism #mathematics

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. ↗

— Herman Melville

#depression #negativity #morals

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#society #economy

Distracted from distraction by distraction ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#internet #social-media #internet

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#new-media #social-media #media

Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#capitalism #corruption #greed #politics #politics-of-the-united-states

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#earnings #economics #income #socialism #wealth

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves. ↗

— J.B. Priestley

#society #teenagers #youth #politicians

It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely ↗

— Flora Rheta Schreiber

#dissociation #dissociative #dissociative-amnesia #dissociative-identity-disorder #fugue