Psychics

"Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?"
--Steven Wright

Remote II

"Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know."
--T. S. Eliot,
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)

Fly III

"I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly."
--Bessie Coleman

Spark

"I'm not saying I'm gonna rule the world or I'm gonna change the world, but I guarantee you that I will spark the brain that will change the world. And that's our job, It's to spark somebody else watching us. We might not be the ones, but let's not be selfish and because we not gonna change the world let's not talk about how we should change it. I don't know how to change it, but I know if I keep talking about how dirty it is out here, somebody's gonna clean it up."
--Tupac Shakur,
MTV Interview (1994)

Pharaoh

"As long as we see America and her wealth as something that we want, we will never leave Pharaoh. As God's hand touched the wealth of Pharaoh, it is now touching the wealth of America. As the Black man and woman become more awakened to the wicked machinations of government, the aim is the same today: We should never be free of their influence and power."
--Louis Farrakhan

Travesty

"You can't tear up everything just to get the dollar out of it without suffering as result. It is a travesty to burn our woods and thereby burn up the fertilizer nature has provided for us. We must enrich our soil every year instead of merely depleting it. It is fundamental that nature will drive away those who commit sin against it."
--George Washington Carver

Oppressor

"I'm not gonna help nobody get something my negroes don't have. If I'm gonna die, I'll die now right here fighting you, if I'm gonna die. You my enemy. My enemies are white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. You won't even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs, and you want me to go somewhere and fight, but you won't even stand up for me here at home."
--Muhammad Ali
Regarding the Vietnam War and conscription (1967)

Expand

"We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level--to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. And as long as it’s civil rights, this comes under the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. But the United Nations has what’s known as the charter of human rights; it has a committee that deals in human rights. You may wonder why all of the atrocities that have been committed in Africa and in Hungary and in Asia, and in Latin America are brought before the UN, and the Negro problem is never brought before the UN. This is part of the conspiracy. This old, tricky blue eyed liberal who is supposed to be your and my friend, supposed to be in our corner, supposed to be subsidizing our struggle, and supposed to be acting in the capacity of an adviser, never tells you anything about human rights. They keep you wrapped up in civil rights. And you spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor."
--Malcolm X,
Speech, "The Ballot Or The Bullet"
Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)

Know

"The world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you or I do."
--Booker T. Washington,
Address to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Boston, Massachusetts (July 30, 1903)

Unrestrained

"Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution...in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element." '
--Rosa Luxemburg
(1880-1919)
Source: in The Russian Revolution

Device

"A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process."
--B.F. Skinner,
"Walden Two"

Rather II

"I would rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I'm not. "
--Wayne W. Dyer

Undisputed

"We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision."
--U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland,
US vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969)

Hopelessly II

"The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise."
--Issac Asimov,
"Second Foundation" (1953)

Power VI

"Whatever power you give politicians and bureaucrats to use against other people will eventually be used by future politicians and bureaucrats against you."
--Michael Boldin,
Founder of Tenth Amendment Center

Candle III

"You know what I want you to do? I want you to blow out the candle and curse the darkness."
--Mort Sahl

Victor

"The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means."
--Barbara Marciniak,
"Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living"

Sham

"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue."
--George Orwell

Unexorcised

"It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may very well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood."
--Joseph Campbell,
"The Hero with a Thousand Faces" (1949)

Alibi II

"When the Judgment Day comes civilization will have an alibi, 'I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with.'"
--Will Rogers,
Daily Telegram # 926, "A General Digging Out Of Old War Contracts" (July 15, 1929)