#w

Tis the night—the night Of the grave's delight, And the warlocks are at their play; Ye think that without, The wild winds shout, But no, it is they—it is they! ↗

— Arthur Cleveland Coxe

#play

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#authoritarianism #bill-of-rights #constitution #democracy #egalitarianism

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#sex #world

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. ↗

— Desmond Tutu

#incrementalism #kindness #world

If no one in the entire world cared about you, did you really exist at all? ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#theresa-gray #world

Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them. ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#world

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book. ↗

— Stéphane Mallarmé

#reading #world

It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves. ↗

— Ken Kesey

#existence #world

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#throne #world

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#despair #poetry #world