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Quotations
Sunbeams
February 2020Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears.
Sunbeams
December 2019Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.
Sunbeams
November 2019Until a few years ago, a man who had no debts was considered virtuous, honest, and hardworking. Today, he’s an extraterrestrial. Whoever does not owe, does not exist. I owe, therefore I am.
Sunbeams
October 2019Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
Sunbeams
September 2019There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: [One is] as the people you call when there’s a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler’s head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.
Sunbeams
August 2019Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. . . . We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.
Sunbeams
July 2019The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.
Sunbeams
June 2019It is an illusion to suppose that a dictator makes himself; at most he seizes an opportunity made for him by passive, stupid, incompetent, and, above all, unsatisfied and fearful men.
Sunbeams
May 2019Government is a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build or you can use a hammer to destroy.
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