Activist Death Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Activist Death. Here they are! All 93 of them:

In other words, if someone had a known history of being stalked or bullied, their so-called self-imposed death could provide a killer with the perfect cover for committing a crime.
Louise Burfitt-Dons (The Missing Activist)
The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline. A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.
Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Walgreen Foundation Lectures))
Some animal rights activists are demanding vegetarianism, even veganism now, or nothing. But since only 4 or 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarians, 'nothing' is the far more likely outcome. I ask these activists to weigh the horrors of Bladen County's industrial farms and the Tar Heel slaughterhouse against the consequences of doing nothing to alleviate the hour-to-hour sufferings of its victims. Is not a life lived off the factory farm and a death humanely inflicted superior to the terrible lives we know they lead and the horrible deaths we know they suffer in Bladen County today?
Steven M. Wise (An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River)
Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.
Marya Mannes
Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
You’ll never truly know how strong your spiritual practice is until you’re faced with your own mortality. Until you’re faced with an incurable disease, and you realize that the greater battle is not one of body, but the one in your mind.
Bill Madden
Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it
Dick Gregory
If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight’s quest to create ground for yourself, to create a space for yourself, to stand there and say, “I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I’m not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.” This became my first big fight. While I consider myself to be fantastically boring, I realized that if I took on my own sexual identity and came out and just told people about it and tried to have a chat with them—tried to be offhand and casual about it—and tried to build our place in society and humanity, then that would be a good mission. This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. How you self-identify with your sexuality matters not one wit. What you do in life—what you do to add to the human existence—that is what matters. That is the beautiful thing.
Eddie Izzard (Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens)
First law of responsible activism - make way for the ambulance, otherwise, there's no difference between you and a petty terrorist.
Abhijit Naskar (Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live)
I cannot stop the oppressions of the past, but I’ll keep working till death, to prevent the oppressions of the future.
Abhijit Naskar (Revolution Indomable)
Love is a commandment, Father Hugo said. It is a choice, a preference. If we love God with our whole hearts, how much heart have we left? If we love with our whole mind and soul and strength, how much mind and soul and strength have we left? We must live this life now. Death changes nothing. If we do not learn to enjoy God now we never will. If we do not learn to praise Him and thank Him and rejoice in Him now, we never will.
Dorothy Day (The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist)
In Peshawar during the 1980s he had been overshadowed by Abdullah Azzam. In Saudi Arabia he was just one rich young sheikh among hundreds. But in Khartoum his wealth made him a rare and commanding figure. He was powerful enough to order men to their deaths. Yet he fashioned himself a lecturer-businessman, an activist theologian in the image of Azzam.
Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers now is not “over-policing,” and certainly not brutal policing. The NYPD has one of the lowest rates of officer shootings and killings in the country; it is recognized internationally for its professionalism and training standards. Deaths such as Eric Garner’s are an aberration, which the department does everything it can to avoid. The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers today is de-policing. After years of ungrounded criticism from the press and activists, after highly publicized litigation and the passage of ill-considered laws—such as the one making officers financially liable for alleged “racial profiling”—NYPD officers have radically scaled back their discretionary activity. Pedestrian stops have dropped 80 percent citywide and almost 100 percent in some areas. The department is grappling with how to induce officers to use their lawful authority again to stop crime before it happens. Garner’s death was a heartbreaking tragedy, but the unjustified backlash against misdemeanor enforcement is likely to result in more tragedy for New Yorkers.
Heather Mac Donald (The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe)
Men's rights activists tend to make a series of valid observations from which they proceed to a single, 180-degree-wrong conclusion. They are correct to point out that, worldwide, suicide is the most common form of death for men under fifty. It's also true that men are more likely than women to have serious problems with alcohol, that men die younger, that the prison population is 95 per cent male and that the lack of support for our returning frontline soldiers is a national disgrace. So far, so regrettably true. They are incorrect, however, to lay any of this at the door of 'feminism', a term which they use almost interchangeably with 'women'. [...] No, sir. No, lads. No, Daddy. That won't help us and it won't help anyone else. Men in trouble are often in trouble precisely because they are trying to Get a Grip and Act Like a Man. We are at risk of suicide because the alternative is to ask for help, something we have been repeatedly told is unmanly. We are in prison because the traditional breadwinning expectation of manhood can't be met, or the pressure to conform is too great, or the option of violence has been frowned upon but implicitly sanctioned since we were children. [...] We die younger than women because, for one thing, we don't go to the doctor. We don't take ourselves too seriously. We don't want to be thought self-indulgent. The mark of a real man is being able to tolerate a chest infection for three months before laying off the smokes or asking for medicine.
Robert Webb (How Not To Be a Boy)
It was probably inevitable that the anti-intellectualism of American life would invade college campuses, but that is no reason to surrender to it. And make no mistake: campuses in the United States are increasingly surrendering their intellectual authority not only to children, but also to activists who are directly attacking the traditions of free inquiry that scholarly communities are supposed to defend. I
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
There is no other industry as cruel and oppressive as factory farming. With regard to numbers affected, extent and length of suffering, and numbers of premature deaths, no other industry can even approach factory farming. Billions of individuals are exploited from genetically engineered birth, through excruciating confinement, to conveyor belt dismemberment. Consequently, there is no industry more appropriate for social justice activists to boycott.
Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
A talk show, for example, with one scientist who says genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and one activist who says they are dangerous looks “balanced,” but in reality that is ridiculously skewed, because nearly nine out of ten scientists think GMOs are safe for consumption. At some point, in the midst of all the bickering, the public simply gives up and goes back to relying on simpler sources of information, even if it is a meme on Facebook.
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.
Casey Cep (Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee)
You may come or not to walk beside me, I won't stand still in silence while the oceans burn and the sun turns dark - I will either right the wrongs or perish in the attempt - and even if I burn to ashes in trying to humanize my surroundings, those ashes of mine will still smoke inclusion, equality and humaneness - I am not born a human to crawl as an indifferent vermin, I am born a human to embrace death for the values, the principles, the virtues that ought to be the foundation of human civilization - I am sleepless and I will stay sleepless till all the children of earth can sleep in peace with a full stomach and a happy heart, without worrying about guns and bombs, without worrying about prejudice and phobia, without worrying about discrimination and deportation - I will stay sleepless till the whole world becomes a family, not in theory, not in philosophy, not in argument, not even in futuristic vision, but in reality and practice.
Abhijit Naskar (Sleepless for Society)
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” –G. K. Chesterton English philosopher known as the “prince of paradox” “All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.” –John Gunther American journalist, author of Death Be Not Proud “The acquisition of riches has been for many men, not an end, but a change, of troubles.” –Epicurus Ancient Greek philosopher, founder of the school of Epicureanism “To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” –Eleanor Roosevelt Longest-serving First Lady of the United States, diplomat, and activist
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
Beyond that, as Miller has explained, “People who are able to accept their frustrated lives do not change conditions.” Willy is not passive: “his activist nature is what leads mankind to progress . . . you must look behind his ludicrousness to what he is actually confronting, and that is as serious a business as anyone can imagine.” (Beijing, 27) This claim is a large one. Willy, to Miller, is not a pathological case, and anyone who plays him as such makes a serious mistake. He is battling for his life, fighting to sustain a sense of himself that makes it worthwhile living at all in a world which seemingly offers ever less space for the individual.
Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem)
People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system. Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.
Peter Gelderloos (How Nonviolence Protects the State)
For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government
Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture)
Tagore criticized the ideas behind the form of political action Bengal began to witness: secret societies, acquisition of bombs and other weapons, induction of very young activists, and political assassination. This path of action created some iconic figures of revolutionary militancy against foreign rule. Tagore did not question their heroism but he questioned the political efficacy of their action. Anguished to see the death of heroic freedom fighters he urged, We must not forget ourselves in our excitement, it needs to be explained to those who are excited that … whatever the strength of the urge [to resist foreign rule], in action we have to take to the broad highway because a shortcut through a narrow lane will lead us nowhere. Just because we are in our mind impatient, the World does not curtail the length of the road nor does Time curtail itself. There was no shortcut of the kind militants imagined. Tagore went on, in his own metaphorical language, to point to the limitations of the militants’ violence. Anger against repression by government had sparked off violent action. ‘But a spark and a flame are two different things. The spark does not dispel the dark in our home’, a flame that lasts is needed. ‘The flame needs a lamp. And thus long preparation is required to prepare the lamp and its wick and its fuel.’13 Thus patient preparation in politics was required, not unthinking haste in the path of violence.
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation)
Unspoken Truths (The Sonnet) Democracy is people-approved dictatorship, Military is people-approved genocide. Atom bombs are people-approved armageddon, In conscience-court all guilty of homicide. There is no time left, for there never was time, Time begins with the beginning of civilization. And civilization is something we are yet to find, Hence, there is no question of clock progression. Nationalist chimps sell war in the name of security, Stoneage civilians rush to bulk-buy graveyard plots. Merchant of murder, you, yell about peacekeeping, While you feast on nationalism like wet little cods! When cavemen take pride in their national glory of death, Sanctuary becomes asylum for the lunatic walking dead!
Abhijit Naskar (Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth)
Not long before my heart was shredded by “Ryan,” I saw the superb, painful, and infuriating documentary God Loves Uganda, a film by the astounding Roger Ross Williams. The doc examined the role of American evangelicalism in Uganda, its ties to a recently introduced bill, the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act—which then suggested the death penalty for LGBTQ+ people—as it gained serious momentum. It follows missionaries, evangelical leaders, and the LGBTQ+ people of Uganda who fight for their right to exist. These activists were standing up against vicious oppression, rhetoric, and ideas originally introduced and continuously perpetuated by the West. Concealed in “good deeds,” American missionaries created infrastructure for access to indoctrinate the populace, which fueled anti-LGBTQ+ violence and hate.
Elliot Page (Pageboy: A Memoir)
There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you’re a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it’s life or death. But at Harvard, it’s about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue—it wouldn’t hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they’re really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who’s genuinely starving?
Greg Gutfeld (Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You)
Both the date of Lennon’s murder and the careful selection of this particular victim are very important. Six weeks after Lennon’s death, Ronald Reagan would become President. Reagan and his soon-to-be appointed cabinet were prepared to build up the Pentagon war machine and increase the potential for war against the USSR. The first strike would fall on small countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. Lennon, alone, was the only man (even without his fellow Beatles) who had the ability to draw out one million anti-war protestors in any given city within 24 hours if he opposed those war policies. John Lennon was a spiritual force. He was a giant, like Gandhi, a man who wrote about peace and brotherly love. He taught an entire generation to think for themselves and challenge authority. Lennon and the Beatles’ songs shout out the inequalities of American life and the messages of change. Change is a threat to the longtime status quo that Reagan’s team exemplified. On my weekly radio broadcast of December 7, 1980, I stated, “The old assassination teams are coming back into power.” The very people responsible for covering up the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King, for Watergate and Koreagate, and the kidnapping and murder of Howard Hughes, and for hundreds of other deaths, had only six weeks before they would again be removing or silencing those voices of opposition to their policies. Lennon was coming out once more. His album was cut. He was preparing to be part of the world, a world which was a worse place since the time he had withdrawn with his family. It was a sure bet Lennon would react and become a social activist again. That was the threat. Lennon realized that there was danger in coming back into public view. He took that dangerous chance and we all lost!
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
Nazi ideology was an answer to every dimension of Germany’s vulnerability to the world. Some of this the Nazis spelled out clearly at the time, and it contributed to their popularity. Some of it they only hinted at, or they did not explain the full implications of what they planned to do. Their commitment to withdrawing from the world economy, from trade deals, and from all the financial arrangements that were part of the gold standard, was explicit. As early as the Twenty-Five Points, the Nazis had been clear that noncitizens, including refugees and all Jews, could not count on remaining in Germany after a Nazi takeover or on having any political or civil rights. Even before 1933, the Nazis’ paramilitary forces were deploying themselves covertly for defense of the eastern border. The Nazis left no doubt at all that they would ban the Communist Party and that all Communist activists would be subject to arrest, or worse.
Benjamin Carter Hett (The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic)
There are too many people working to better the lives of those who already have more than they need, yet those who are in need of real help spend each day with no hope or help to speak of - why my friend - why - they are waiting for you - they are wailing for you - don't you hear them - don't you hear their tears dropping on the lifeless soil beneath their feet! You worry about philosophical questions like, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound - yet you pay no attention to real questions of life and death that actually require your intervention more than any philosophical question in the world! Why - I ask you again - why - why is it that philosophy, technology and argumentation have more grip over your psyche than the actual troubles of the people! Don't answer me - just think - think and when you have thought enough, shred all shallow philosophical pomp and rush right away to the helpless, the forgotten, the destitute as the real, practical answer to their life.
Abhijit Naskar (When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation)
The suffering of abused pets amounts to a tiny fraction of the suffering we inflict on animals. In 2012 there were 164 million owned dogs and cats in the United States.2 The majority of them probably live reasonably good lives, but even if every single one of them were abused, this number would be dwarfed by the 9.1 billion animals annually raised and slaughtered for food in the United States.3 Factory-farmed animals have to endure a lifetime of suffering much more severe than the typical dog or cat, and in the United States there are fifty-five times as many factory-farmed animals as there are dogs and cats. Anyone who kept a dog confined in the way that breeding sows are frequently confined in factory farms—in crates so small they cannot even turn around or walk a single step—would be liable to prosecution for cruelty. In The Animal Activists’ Handbook Matt Ball and Bruce Friedrich make a startling claim that vividly illustrates the vastly greater suffering of animals raised for food compared to other ways in which we cause animals to suffer: “Every year, hundreds of millions of animals—many times more than the total number killed for fur, housed in shelters, and locked in laboratories combined—don’t even make it to slaughter. They actually suffer to death.
Peter Singer (The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically)
I preached at First Congregational Church of Battle Creek, Michigan, in June 2017, and they shared this version of “Come Thou Fount” with me. I share it with you here as a call to action and as an invitation to the politics of resilience in an age of the tyranny of the now: Come thou fount of every blessing, give me courage to resist. Oh dear God they came and killed you, but at death you shook your fist. Make me clever like the steward, make me angry like the poor, teach me to unbind the captive, teach me to unbar the door. O dear God, I have such power, that I never toiled to earn. Help me wield it for liberation, may the fires of your justice burn. Guide me God to read you truly, may your truth be named and heard, When I read the holy scripture, help me God to hear your Word. Moving Wind, your seed of justice, grows into a mustard tree— it is so big, and obnoxious, is there room there, God, for me? O my Jesus, come like leaven, infiltrate our hearts and minds as we struggle to be human, help us to decolonize. When the powers stand against us, when we join hands with the meek, help us God against their fury; wield the weapons of the weak. As we stand up to oppression, as we speak the truth to power— Holy One, you walk beside us: we need you every hour. While I struggle with my hatred, with my fear and bigotry: help me Lord to join your struggle, help me dance this way with thee. Give me prophets to confront me, give me comrades in the call! Give me visions of that day when we will see the powers fall!
Robyn Henderson-Espinoza (Activist Theology)
Those who are willing to work for change, and make changes, too often do so only for the sake of their own liberation, without much thought to the oppression of others—especially other species. Feminists lobby against sex wage discrepancies, gays fight homophobic laws, and the physically challenged demand greater access—each fighting for injustices that affect their lives, and/or the lives of their loved ones. Yet these dedicated activists usually fail to make even a slight change in their consumer choices for the sake of other much more egregiously oppressed and exploited individuals. While it is important to fight for one’s own liberation, it is counterproductive (not to mention selfish and small minded) to fight for one’s own liberation while willfully continuing to oppress others who are yet lower on the rungs of hierarchy. While fighting for liberation, it makes no sense for feminists to trample on gays, for gays to trample on the physically challenged, or for the physically challenged to trample on feminists. It also makes no sense for any of these social justice activists to willfully exploit factory farmed animals. Can we not at least avoid exploiting and dominating others while working for our personal liberation? Those who seek greater justice—whatever their cause—must make choices that diminish the cruel exploitation of others. As a matter of consistency and solidarity, social justice activists must reject dairy products, eggs, and flesh. There is no other industry as cruel and oppressive as factory farming. With regard to numbers affected, extent and length of suffering, and numbers of premature deaths, no other industry can even approach factory farming. Billions of individuals are exploited from genetically engineered birth, through excruciating confinement, to conveyor belt dismemberment. Consequently, there is no industry more appropriate for social justice activists to boycott. Even if we aren’t prepared to take a public stand, or take on another cause, we must at least make a private commitment on behalf of cows, pigs, and hens by leaving animal products on the shelf at the grocery store.
Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
The Commissioner asserts 'motivated intruders' evidence from Professor Anderaon was accepted under cross-examination as an 'over-extension' from his personal experiences with completely unrelated animal rights activists - see para.24 of the closing submissions, Professor Anderson's "wild speculations" about the possibility of "young men, borderline sociopathic or psychopathic" attaching themselves to the PACE trial criticism 'do him no credit". Nor do his extrapolations from benign Twitter requests for information to an "organised campaign” from an "adversarial group" show that he has maintained the necessary objectivity and accuracy that he is required to maintain. He does not distinguish between legitimate ethical and political disagreement, and the use of positions of access to confidential data. He stated that where there was legitimate disagreement one should assume that people will act in unlawful ways, This proposition that one should in every case assume the absolute worst about data disclosure is clearly neither sensible nor realistic. Freedom of Information Act tribunal judgment
Brian Kennedy
If you look at the – freedom, democracy, equality, liberty– all of that can be qualified by saying, "What about me? What about us?" The idea of my tribe versus your tribe, etc. Freedom – what about Liberians who have been oppressed by the systems? Equality – what about institutional "Black-on-Black Apartheid?”What about the creators of the flawed systems who are now so-called liberators of the people?" What about the Americos versus the Natives, while disregarding the symptoms of the problems? What about your party versus my party, constantly at war, and are not focused on the issues? Justice? How about “give me liberty or give me death?” Until then, the unsolved queries remain in Liberia's delusional political arenas. Until then, we'll never have a country without truths!!
Henry Johnson Jr
The other article was by Lois Weiner, a professor who prepared urban teachers at New Jersey City University. Weiner was a parent activist at P.S. 3 in District 2, which she described as a highly progressive alternative school with an unusual degree of parent involvement. She claims that district administrators were stifling teachers and parents at P.S.3 by mandating "constructivist" materials and specific instructional strategies ... She [Weiner] continued, "The degree of micromanagement is astounding." Those who challenged the district office's mandates, she said, risked getting an unsatisfactory rating or being fired. Weiner contended that "opposition from parents is building against the new math curriculum," which was supposed to be field-tested with control groups, but instead was mandated for every classroom." Teachers were expressly prohibited from using other math textbooks or materials, and some were clandestinely "photocopying pages of now-banned workbooks.
Diane Ravitch (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education)
Stepping up to build a world where our smiling children do not return home in a body bag, is not a political matter, it's a human matter. Stepping up to build a world where civilians are not shot to death by the very keepers of law solely because of their color, is not a political matter, it's a human matter. Stepping up to build a world where women have the right to their own life and future, is not a political matter, it's a human matter. Stepping up to build a world where people are not persecuted based on religion, is not a political matter, it's a human matter. Stepping up to build a world where people are not treated as lesser beings based on sexuality, is not a political matter, it's a human matter. In short, stepping up to build a world where humans are treated as humans by the humans, is not a political matter, it is the fundamental criterion for a human society. And with the last ounce of strength in my veins I shall continue this struggle, even if I have to walk alone, bearing ridicule and abuse from a shortsighted, bigoted, apathetic and discriminatory world.
Abhijit Naskar (Bulldozer on Duty)
Ain't My Fourth of July (The Sonnet) Fourth of July comes and goes, Yet slavery remains and thrives. It kills in the name of supremacy, It causes ruin in a pro-life guise. Real advocates of life value life, And place life above all belief. Belief that values guns over person, Is only pro-death and pro-disease. Freedom involves accountability, Without which we are just free animals. Those who turn superstition into law, Are no judge but a bunch of dumbbells. This ain't my Fourth of July, for I actually value life. Till all lives are deemed equal, I'll continue to strive.
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
...in practice, communism has generated some of the greatest atrocities of history and been responsible for the deaths of millions.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
I Hate Guns (The Sonnet) Please don't hold a gun to my head, Because firearms terrify me to death. When I am scared stiff due to stupidity, Nothing can keep the beast from outbreak. I battle everyday to keep it tamed, I dread the moment the beast finds release. Mock me, hit me, I assure your safe return, Hold a gun, and be torn apart limb from limb! So, I implore you, o savage most refined, Please show some mercy, and give up your guns! Or be a stupid moron, and carry in secret, Just not stupid enough to draw at my loved ones. Committing primitivity even God won't escape the Ravager. Bullets work on two-bit terrorists, not natural disaster.
Abhijit Naskar (Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence)
Luther said images were tolerable if they were not worshipped. A cobbler undertook to engage Luther in debate, quoting as "scripture" the sentence "I wish my bride to be naked and do not wish for her to be wearing her gown." Apparently he meant that one should approach God directly without the gown of images, but the absurdity of the "quotation" made Luther put his face in his He quickly changed his mind about the wisdom of a literary debate. When he got back to Wittenberg, he advised the princes to expel Karlstadt from Saxony without delay, and by September 18 Karlstadt was ordered out of the elector's territories. Ronald Sider has summarized the differences between the styles of Luther and Karlstadt. Luther wanted to go slowly; Karlstadt was in a hurry and maintained the activist faith that (in my view) resonates in the great works published by Luther in 1520, that if right doctrines were clearly proclaimed and argued from scripture, preachers could be hold, God would do the rest, and the gospel would take care of itself." In a letter of October 1520 to a friend about the uproar caused by publication of the Babylonian Captivity, Luther wrote confidently of the tumults that must come when the gospel was truly preached.34 That continued to be his opinion at Worms. His attitude in that heady time was clearly to let justice be done though the world fall. But by 1524 Luther was thinking as a tactician; Karlstadt was booming ahead, in expectation not that God would open the skies and do miracles to vindicate him but that God would act through the common folk to make right doctrine prevail. Luther's passion for order was such that he could brook no threat of tumult, and Karlstadt's reliance on the common people was alarming, especially when armed rebellion shouldered its way into German society. Luther could argue for Christian equality in a somewhat abstract form in 1520 when he wrote The Freedom of a Christian and the Babylonian Captivity. In 1524, when it came to flesh-and-blood peasants and other commoners, he changed his mind.
Richard Marius (Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death)
No, what makes abortion difficult is not some fancy lawyering from the right, but the near refusal to defend it from the left. The hard sell is almost always left to women and “abortion activists,” while men scramble around trying not to piss off a diner in Ohio. I can turn over a rock on Twitter and find some person with no legal training able to passionately explain why segregation is wrong, or why the death penalty is immoral, or how “love is love.” But ask people about abortion and it’s all, “Well… I think the important thing is that women get to choose for themselves! Retweet if you agree!” Don’t get me wrong, “choice” is great. It’s a fine frame. It’s a language designed to appeal to people who have a genuinely held religious belief about when life begins, and even the word choice should remind those adherents that not everybody shares their choice of God either, and yet we co-exist. But the better legal frame is “Forced birth is some evil shit that can never be compelled by a legitimate government. The end.” Hell, if you don’t like my Eighth or Fourteenth Amendment arguments in defense of abortion rights, I could give some Thirteenth Amendment arguments. Because the same amendment that prohibited slavery surely prohibits the state from renting out women’s bodies, for free, for nine months, to further its interests. Forced labor is already unconstitutional. 
Elie Mystal (Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution)
Love is our nationality, not land. Compassion is our religion, not creed. Conscience is our byword, not constitution. Heil Hitler, God save the king, Vande Mataram, Patria o Muerte - it's all the same - a declaration of tribal glory, with no concern for the rest of humanity. Such archaic attitude suits a bronze-age society, not a civilized one. It's time for Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (world is family), not Vande Mataram (hail the motherland) - it's time for Mundo y Vida (world and life), not Patria o Muerte (homeland or death) - it's time for Humans save Humanity, not God save the king.
Abhijit Naskar (Her Insan Ailem: Everyone is Family, Everywhere is Home)
The goals set by Stanton, Truth, and Anthony that were achieved during the twentieth-century long after their deaths were audacious. Because of these pioneers and the activists who followed them, women can now own property; divorce an abusive husband; vote; be elected to public office; be professors, executives, or astronauts; fly planes; and wear clothes that would have shocked everyone who lived in the nineteenth century (when women's ankles weren't supposed to be seen). All of these are solid and necessary gains, but today, even in states whose laws declare that breastfeeding cannot be considered "indecent exposure," the harassment of mothers for breastfeeding their babies when they leave their homes continues to a degree that is simply unacceptable. This rudeness to strangers and their babies can and must be stopped. In the nineteenth century, most U.S. mothers—if their health was good— nursed their babies, and people took it for granted that this elemental, nurturing act would have to take place as women traveled. I think it would have been hard for people in the nineteenth century to anticipate that advertising and marketing campaigns by infant formula companies would become the dominant factor in parents' decisions about infant feeding and that infant formula companies could so easily convince the medical profession to become the first promoters of their products.
Ina May Gaskin (Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding: From the Nation's Leading Midwife)
The goals set by Stanton, Truth, and Anthony that were achieved during the twentieth-century long after their deaths were audacious. Because of these pioneers and the activists who followed them, women can now own property; divorce an abusive husband; vote; be elected to public office; be professors, executives, or astronauts; fly planes; and wear clothes that would have shocked everyone who lived in the nineteenth century (when women's ankles weren't supposed to be seen). All of these are solid and necessary gains, but today, even in states whose laws declare that breastfeeding cannot be considered "indecent expo-sure," the harassment of mothers for breastfeeding their babies when they leave their homes continues to a degree that is simply unacceptable. This rudeness to strangers and their babies can and must be stopped. In the nineteenth century, most U.S. mothers—if their health was good— nursed their babies, and people took it for granted that this elemental, nurturing act would have to take place as women traveled. I think it would have been hard for people in the nineteenth century to anticipate that advertising and marketing campaigns by infant-formula companies would become the dominant factor in parents' decisions about infant feeding and that infant-formula companies could so easily convince the medical profession to become the first promoters of their products.
Ina May Gaskin (Ina May's Guide to Breastfeeding: From the Nation's Leading Midwife)
Starting in the Clinton era and continuing through George W. Bush’s two terms, progressive activists mounted direct pressure—either in the form of public protest or lawsuits—against banks. This was aimed at intimidating banks to adopt new lending standards and also to engage the activist groups themselves in the lending process. In 1994, a young Barack Obama, recently graduated from Harvard Law School, joined two other attorneys in suing Citibank for “discriminatory lending” because it had denied home loans to several bank applicants. The case was called Selma S. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. Citibank denied wrongdoing, but as often happens in such situations, it settled the lawsuit to avoid litigation costs and the negative publicity. Selma Buycks-Roberson and two of her fellow plaintiffs altogether received $60,000, and Obama and his fellow lawyers received nearly a million dollars in legal fees. This was a small salvo in a massive fusillade of lawsuits filed against banks and financial institutions in the 1990s. ACORN, the most notorious of these groups, had its own ally in the Clinton administration: Hillary Clinton. (Around the same time, ACORN was also training an aspiring community activist named Barack Obama.) Hillary helped to raise money for ACORN and also for a closely allied group, the Industrial Areas Foundation. The IAF had been founded by Saul Alinsky and continued to operate as an aggressive leftist pressure group long after Alinsky’s death in 1972. Hillary lent her name to these groups’ projects and met several times with their organizers in the White House. ACORN’s efforts were also supported by progressive politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Jon Corzine, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid. These politicians berated the banks to make loans easier to get. “I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness,” Frank said at a September 25, 2003, hearing. “I want to roll the dice a little more.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
The surface causes of Adams’s anxieties are not difficult to discern. Every activist knew the penalty for treason. Every congressman knew that prison, perhaps death, would be his reward if the American rebellion failed.
John Ferling (John Adams: A Life)
Department. The Rev. Jamal H. Bryant, pastor of the Empowerment Temple and a local activist, said city residents have "almost been anesthetized" to the killings. "In any other community, these numbers would be jaw-dropping." A month before Gray's death,
Anonymous
Maya the Chihuahua wound up dead in 2014. Maya was a beloved member of Wilbur Cerate’s family on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. One Saturday in October when Cerate came home from work, according to local TV station WAVY, Maya was gone. Cerate checked his security cameras, which had captured video of two women in a PETA van backing into the driveway, snatching Maya off the porch and driving off. Three days later, two women from PETA returned to the home and explained that Maya had been killed. They brought a fruit basket.27, 28 Perhaps it was the tiniest bit of solace for Cerate’s little daughter that her beloved Maya did not die a painful death, other than the terror of being snatched up by strangers and hauled to some foreign facility that, at best, must have seemed like a veterinarian’s office. Many of the other animals who die at the hands of bird-brained animal-rights activists suffer horrible deaths.
Eric Bolling (Wake Up America: The Nine Virtues That Made Our Nation Great—and Why We Need Them More Than Ever)
It's a sad state of affairs when you get used to the sight of blood, glorifying aggression as bravehearted. It's a sad state of affairs when you feel good dressing up for gala, while children are being bombed to death.
Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets)
Visvavitamin (The Sonnet) It's a sad state of affairs when you get used to the sight of blood, glorifying aggression as bravehearted. It's a sad state of affairs when you feel good dressing up for gala, while children are being bombed to death. Sometimes aggression may be our last resort, but never normalize it as civilized way of life. The beast in me knows well to crush bones, but the reformer I am, works to preserve life. It's a sad state of affairs when prejudice is glorified as piety, and curiosity is branded blasphemy, when lies are honored as liberty, and empathy is declared unholy. Bandaid to the broken, backbone to the fallen. Vital to world-light, we are Visvavitamin.
Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets)
I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world by war. How many more wars do we need? How many deaths? How many rapes? How much destruction? How much pain? I don't believe we can’t change anything through peace.
Bhuwan Thapaliya
Sometimes, matadors got gored (...) Aficionados viewed their dramatic deaths like martyrdom in a holy war. Some animal rights activists also marked these gruesome occasions in their mental calendars.
Rachael Adam (Sangre De Toro)
Although I loved horror, I wasn’t writing horror then. And sometime between elementary school and graduate school, my characters had transformed from young Black characters on fantastic and futuristic adventures to white characters having quiet epiphanies. I had wonderful writing teachers in college, but somehow with all of that exposure to “canon,” I had lost track of my own voice and was imitating writers whose stories were nothing like the ones hidden in my heart. I was a young Black woman raised by two civil rights activists—attorney John Due and Patricia Stephens Due—and I had grown up in the newly integrated suburbs of Miami-Dade County. I had never seen my life reflected in fiction; I felt like an imposter when I tried to write Black rural or city characters. I often wish I had discovered the writing of Octavia E. Butler sooner, but I had not. Representation matters. Without the work of other authors writing in a similar vein, I had lost sight of myself entirely. Then I discovered Mama Day by Gloria Naylor—finally, a book by a highly respected Black woman writer with metaphysical themes! Mama Day helped nudge me past my fear that I could not be a respected writer, especially as a Black writer, if I wrote about the supernatural. During this time, I also interviewed Anne Rice for my newspaper, since she was scheduled to appear at the Miami Book Fair International. I read one of the novels in her Vampire Chronicles series to prepare, and I also found an article about her in a highly respected magazine suggesting that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires. My worst fear realized! During that telephone interview, I asked Rice how she responded to criticism like this and then listened carefully for her answer—not for my readers, but for me. Rice actually laughed. “That used to bother me,” she said, “but my books are taught in universities.” Then she explained that by writing about the supernatural, she was liberated to discuss big themes like life, death, and love. Touché. Between Hurricane Andrew, Mama Day, and Anne Rice’s (unwitting) advice, I wrote The Between in nine months, looking past my own fears as a writer to follow my true passions. My protagonist, Hilton James, is a Black man who lives in the suburbs. His family reminded me of my own.
Tananarive Due (The Between)
I want to share the stories of two young men. Their lives were in some ways very similiar, yet in other ways profoundly different. Their journey's explored the nature of justice, courage, and character. And both arrived at moments of devastating tragedy and death. Both men left the safety of their homes, driven by a deep conviction to protect those they believed were in danger. Each took risks, crossing state lines, prepared to confront what they believed were threats to justice. Their actions would ripple outward, touching the lives of many others in ways that would change them forever. One young man armed himself to protect businesses he saw threatened by escalating riots in the wake of a protest. That night, he shot three men, wounding one and killing two others. He was later exonerated of all charges. His name is 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse. The other young man chose a different path. He participated in non-violent activism against systemic racism at the height of the Civil Rights movement. He lived with a Black family as a white man—a courageous act in a time and place where such things were almost unheard of. Arrested for his work, he endured a week in brutal jail conditions before being released. Abandoned by authorities, he and his fellow activists were left to find their own way home. As they sought to quench their thirst at a store, a man blocked their entrance. He leveled a shotgun at one oft he young Black woman, and fired. In that instant, this young man did not hesitate to push her out of the way, saving her life but losing his own in the process. He was 26 years old. His name was Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian. Today is the feast day to remember and honour the life and sacrifice of Jonathan Daniels. Take some time to reflect on the choices, the work, and the love it took to bring him to that place- a place where, without only a moments thought- gave his life for another. There is no greater love than this.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Youth are absolution to habits of death. Youth are walking illumination manifest.
Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets (Sonnet Centuries))
Illumination Manifest (Youth Sonnet, 1528) Youth are the cure for all dividing insanity. You are the antidote to all bewitching animosity. Don't confuse youth as a measure of agist conventionality. Youth is but a sanctifying dawn, out of the dusk of rigidity. Youth is the spirit of play with the forces of ominosity. Youth is the conquest of death into the daring pastures of duty. Youth are absolution to habits of death. Youth are walking illumination manifest.
Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets (Sonnet Centuries))
3 While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed. BREAKING THE SILENCE Activists in the early campaign for AIDS awareness created a powerful slogan: “Silence=Death.” Silence about trauma also leads to death—the death of the soul. Silence reinforces the godforsaken isolation of trauma. Being able to say aloud to another human being, “I was raped” or “I was battered by my husband” or “My parents called it discipline, but it was abuse” or “I’m not making it since I got back from Iraq,” is a sign that healing can begin. We may think we can control our grief, our terror, or our shame by remaining silent, but naming offers the possibility of a different kind of control. When Adam was put in charge of the animal kingdom in the Book of Genesis, his first act was to give a name to every living creature.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
Life and death are civilian affair. A reformer works each day with coffin in pocket. There'll be no life for any of the civilians, If the reformer slips into drunken enjoyment.
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
If you actually want to tackle climate crisis, then instead of yelling at the politicians like a hysterical Karen and obstructing traffic, educate the masses on clean energy and get involved in startups working on affordable clean energy solutions.
Abhijit Naskar (Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live)
We cannot escape theologies and ethics; that, too, is a struggle! Yet, honoring our theological values that animate our work and drive our social practices can help minimize the struggle by offering us places of belonging and bonding in a world that rather fragments us and damns us to the other side, where death lingers.
Robyn Henderson-Espinoza (Activist Theology)
Nukes and Peace It takes hundreds of years of hard work to build a civilization, and yet with the press of a button we can destroy it all in a day. Let us not press the button my friend. In fact, if we must destroy something let us destroy the very button of destruction, both from outside and inside. Let us incapacitate every single button of death and destruction, be it technological or psychological, and redirect that energy towards creation and conservation. You see, destroying the nukes mean nothing. Destroy one, another will be built in its place in a matter of months. We have to nuke the hate in us first, so that we no longer feel the need for nukes against our own kind. However, for the sake of investigation, let us forget the common sense of peace, and talk defense strategy for a moment, in a way that might make sense to world leaders. You see, the best defense against a nuke is not another nuke, but a code. It is the best defense because it is exponentially less expensive. In a technologically advanced world, the most powerful nation is not the one with nuclear power, but the one with coding power. So, to the so-called leaders of the world I say - if you're still foolishly worried about your neighbor's nuclear capabilities, don't go about wasting billions of dollars on a nuclear program, just spend a fragment of those funds on post-launch warhead hacking. But then again, it would open up a new realm of problems at a different level, because any nation with exceptional wireless channel manipulation expertise can remotely take over the command of another nation's nuclear warheads. So, at the end of the day, so long as there is animosity among the nations of the world, between mind and mind, sustained by stupid borders and foul ideologies, there is no safe way out. I'll say it to you plainly. Wasting nuclear power on warheads is a barbaric use of a scientific revolution. Let me elaborate with some numbers. A single nuclear warhead contains nearly 4 kilograms of Plutonium-239, which in a nuclear power plant can produce sufficient heat to generate about 32 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, that is, 32 Gigawatt-hours (GWh). 1 GWh of electricity powers about 700,000 households for one hour, hence 32 GWh would power about 22.4 million households for one hour. Now, if we divide that number by the number of hours in a year, that is, 8760, we are confronted with an astounding revelation. It is that, the radioactive material from one nuclear warhead can power over two thousand households for a year (2557 to be exact). And that's just the radioactive material we are talking about. Many more resources are required to set up a nuclear program. The point is, instead of wasting such potent and precious resources on fancy, frivolous and fictitious geopolitical insecurities, let us redirect those resources to alleviate actual, real human suffering from society. Let us use them to empower communities rather than to dominate them - let us use them to elevate the whole of humankind, rather than to downgrade the parts that we do not like. Because by degrading others, we only degrade ourselves, whereas by lifting others, we rise ourselves. Remember, there is no world peace, so long as fear is off the leash.
Abhijit Naskar (Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather)
Be The Love Commandment (A Sonnet) Instead of worrying about a fictitious judgment day, Make your actual today a real nonjudgment day. Instead of hoping for a fictitious heaven after death, Make this world that you have an abode without hate. Plenty of heart force we have wasted on fiction, Plenty of attention we have placed on insecurity. Now it's time to redirect our time and priorities, It is time to be the valiant vanguards of reality. I ain’t talkin’ about being chained to the reality, Nor about keeping things the way they are for so long. All I'm asking is, we pay attention to the now and here, Instead of obsessing over tales from days long gone. So, stand up to the tyrants as apocalypse incarnate. Reach out to the needy as a living love commandment.
Abhijit Naskar (Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather)
Larry Hjort, an AIDS activist, gave counsel to people who were overwhelmed with the needs of their dying friends. “Everyone is perfectly adequate,” he said. “There are just some impossible situations.
Sallie Tisdale (Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying)
The line between activism and terrorism is so thin that if you scratch the surface of all the activists, you'll end up discovering more terrorists than actual reformers.
Abhijit Naskar (Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live)
Humanitarian Arithmetic (Sonnet 1354) If it takes $300bn to end world hunger, and 7 trillion to fund the next AI wonder, how many people have to starve to death, to feed the appetite of the cyberworld? If Britain's NHS costs about $200bn, and US military costs 800 billion dollars, how many have to suffer from sickness, for the tribal chiefs to feel secure? If it takes $20bn to end homelessness in the US, and trillions to colonize Mars, how many have to sleep in cardboard boxes, for heirs of billionaires to breed on Mars? You don't need to be a Ramanujan or Euler, to solve this simple arithmetic equation. But you do need a living human heart, to take responsibility for the solution.
Abhijit Naskar
That afternoon, Gerry Petrella scheduled a Zoom with dozens of staffers who had worked on Senate committees. Over the months, he had asked them for help cobbling together the details of policies, even though Petrella was coy about the purpose of his requests. But now, he was informing them that all their hard work had been in vain. He watched as the news washed over the faces on his screen. In boxes across his computer, staffers began tearing up. When the press reported the death of the climate negotiations, Manchin’s Senate colleagues allowed their pent-up frustrations to come rushing out. They wanted to hold him personally responsible for the government’s failure to avert climate catastrophe. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico tweeted that Democrats should consider stripping Manchin of his committee chairmanship. That seemed restrained compared with what activists said about Manchin on Twitter. It felt especially painful to learn that they had been so close to a climate bill—as if a generational opportunity had drifted away.
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
My unshaded skin. Snarled and marked of a scoundrel. Scorned and conned. Birds sing in a fair sun, whistles of seas that used to be foreign. My unshaven skin, whispers of owls at night still sing old rivers. Ribs rubbed and punched still sores. Mistakes of songs and words that still linger over me. Marred and murdered death still murmurs.
Tapiwanaishe Pamacheche
Give Me A Keyboard, I'll Give You Revolution (The Sonnet) I just want to write - that's all I ever want - to write, write and write! The day the words stop coming, will be my last corporeal night. Either I shall die by an assassin's bullet, or I shall die on my keyboard, but I refuse to die of old-age and disease. Death scares those who are scared of life, I have already lived my life in service. I live on keyboard, I'll die on keyboard, Keyboard is my instrument of illumination. Nothing short could satisfy my palate - Give me a keyboard, I'll give you revolution. With my keyboard I've defended the meek, With my keyboard I've castrated the pricks. With my keyboard I've brought down dictators, With my keyboard I've schooled bigoted pigs. With my keyboard I've raised Gods by hundreds, With my keyboard I've delivered world-builders. With my keyboard I've produced hatebusters, With my keyboard I've raised bulldozers. Death is but a myth - body dies, not bulldozer; Body is merely a vessel for the mission. If you want your ideas to live forever, You gotta sacrifice your life for a vision. I never lived as body, but only as a dream - My life is testament to the dream of united earth. I don't have a message, for I am the message - Sacrifice is beacon, that illuminates the universe.
Abhijit Naskar (Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn)
Arshadul Qadri Quotes Scholar Date of Birth : 05 Mar, 1925 Date of Death : 29 Apr, 2002 Place of Birth : Ballia, India Profession : Scholar Nationality : Indian Arshadul Qadri was a Sunni Islamic scholar, author and missionary activist in India associated with the Barelvi movement who established several educational institutions and organizations in India.
https://caption.com.bd/person/arshadul-qadri
Even if I accept your bogus excuses for war, today we have the technology to fight wars without actually killing people - only reason we don't, is because it's not economical. Life is not economical, death is - peace is not economical, war is. It's far cheaper to kill enemy soldiers than take them prisoner, at the expense of the taxpayer. One bullet costs half a dollar, whereas one prisoner costs thousands per year. So, naturally, preserving life is not the priority, neither is peace. Besides, think of the rush of pride the primitive taxpayers get, from the headlines - "our nations' gallant forces took down several enemy soldiers in a bone-chilling surgical strike!" And more the primitives of a nation are exposed to this kind of blood-boiling headlines, more they get conditioned to believe, that in every war, they are on the right side of justice. World calls it Geopolitics - I call it Pavlovian Conditioning of Patriotism - where the citizen canines of a state are made to believe even the worst of stately atrocity to be just and righteous, by repeated exposure of a patriotic narrative. As I once said, whoever controls the narrative, controls the people. And fear is at the root of it all. Once the citizens conquer their fear and prejudice, and grow up into civilized thinking humans, that'll be the end of state, war and geopolitical tribalism.
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
Neither fossil fuel nor artificial intelligence is the problem - the real danger is greed. Do you think everybody will live happily ever after, once you replace fossil fuel with green energy! No - they won't! Apekind will simply use green energy to power their greed instead of oil and gas. They will use green energy to wage war, they'll use green energy to kill people. US military is already developing a high-endurance unmanned solar powered aircraft, to be used as a communication relay platform and for surveillance. Besides, solar powered reconnaissance drones have already been in military use for some years now, in various parts of the world. Which means, the planet will be safer, but the people will be in just as much muck as they are today. Apparently, there is a limit to fossil fuel, but there is no limit to human stupidity. Apekind will find one way or another to continue with their "kill or be killed" nonsense, just like any other animal in the wild. And every time government officials will make the same old statement, "it's necessary for national security" - just as power hungry tribal chiefs have been saying since our jungle days, before putting millions upon millions to death! So, my question is - what good is green energy if it's used for the same inhuman purposes as fossil fuel! Treat greed first, you fools - treat greed first! Then you won't need to make a ton of empty promises and winded policies for a sustainable future - because where there is no greed, sustainability flows like spring water. Treat greed first, then I shall call you humankind - until then, you are nothing but apekind. Without the green of heart, what green apes, what oil apes - all energy leads to but one color - the color of blood - red! Energy used to sustain the same old paradigm of greed, control and disparity, is anything but clean - no matter what it says on the label.
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
Civil defense must be rooted in dialogue, not death.
Abhijit Naskar (The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo)
I have only one wish - when death comes, I want it to come in the shape of a bullet, not disease.
Abhijit Naskar (Martyr Meets World: To Solve The Hard Problem of Inhumanity)
The Final Solution (A Sonnet) O new people, o new humanizers, The world has been waiting for you long. Waiting for your dawn with deepest zeal, Society is weary yet tries to be strong. Now rise o makers of civilization, Replenish this death valley with your sanctity. Make rigidity and prejudice quiver, Sanitize humanity with rapids of indivisibility. The sun has gone dark, the moon lost its glory, All are waiting for your galvanizing advent. These deserts can no more sustain life, You alone are hope and the last encouragement. Walk boldly as the awakening of revolution. Wake up from indifference and be the final solution.
Abhijit Naskar (When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation)
Josephus clearly regards the unnamed prophets as false. He compares them with the Sicarii, a splinter activist group who arose during Felix’s time. Josephus considers the false prophets to be more dangerous than these people. As
Josephine Wilkinson (John the Baptist: A Life and Death)
Universities have disinvited Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Ann Coulter, Yiannopoulos, and legions of conservative thinkers and voices in defense of freedom, but a pro-sharia and anti-Israel activist they will defend to the death.
Pamela Geller (FATWA: Hunted in America)
For Sedgwick, productive political work can be achieved by forcing the maintenance of a clear contradiction because doing so undermines a stable sense of meaning for the relevant concepts. The incoherence of endorsing two contradictory models of sexuality at once can help us accept the complexity and mutability of sexuality. Thus, we see here, yet again, the commitment to rejecting objective truth and concrete categories and the idea that incoherence and fluidity are liberating and politically necessary. Queer Theorists can expand this thinking to encompass almost anything and they think of this as “queering” the topic. Theorists have, for instance, queered categories of time and history42 and life and death.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
In 2013, Theorist José Medina coined the melodramatic term hermeneutical death, which describes a failure to be understood so profound as to destroy the person’s sense of self. At the opposite end of this spectrum is the concept of hermeneutical privacy, which describes the right not to be understandable at all.12 So, marginalized people can be oppressed to the point of psychic death by not being understood, but their right to be completely incomprehensible should also be respected. Negotiating this minefield must be very difficult for the well-meaning individual determined not to oppress anybody.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
So, marginalized people can be oppressed to the point of psychic death by not being understood, but their right to be completely incomprehensible should also be respected. Negotiating this minefield must be very difficult for the well-meaning individual determined not to oppress anybody.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
Jazz musician Miles Davis once said, “If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.” bell hooks, a black professor of English at City College of New York who spells her name in lower case, once wrote, “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.” Demond Washington, a star athlete at Tallassee High School in Tallassee, Alabama, got in trouble for saying over the school intercom, “I hate white people and I’m going to kill them all!” Later he said he did not mean it. Someone who probably did mean it was Maurice Heath, who heads the Philadelphia chapter of the New Black Panther party. He once told a crowd, “I hate white people—all of them! . . . You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You’re gonna have to kill some of their babies!” Another one who probably meant it is Dr. Kamau Kambon, black activist and former visiting professor of Africana Studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. In 2005, Prof. Kambon told a panel at Howard University Law School that “white people want to kill us,” and that “we have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.” In 2005, James “Jimi” Izrael, a black editorial assistant for the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald- Leader, was on a radio program to talk about Prof. Kambon. Another guest mentioned other blacks who have written about the fantasy of killing whites, and Mr. Izrael began to laugh. “Listen,” he said, “I’m laughing because if I had a dollar for every time I heard a black person [talking about] killing somebody white I’d be a millionaire.” For some, killing whites is not fantasy. Although the press was quiet about this aspect of the story, the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, DC, area in 2002 had a racial motive. Lee Malvo testified that his confederate, John Muhammad, was driven by hatred of America because of its “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy.” His plan was to kill six whites every day for 30 days. For a 179-day period in 1973 and 1974, a group of Black Muslim “Death Angels” kept the city of San Francisco in a panic as they killed scores of randomly-chosen “blue-eyed devils.” Some 71 deaths were eventually attributed to them. Four of an estimated 14 Death Angels were convicted of first-degree murder. Most Americans have never heard of what became known as the Zebra Killings. A 2005 analysis of crime victim surveys found that 45 percent of the violent crimes blacks committed were against whites, 43 percent against blacks, and 10 percent against Hispanics. There was therefore slightly more black-on-white than black-on-black crime. When whites committed violence they chose black victims only 3 percent of the time. Violence by whites against blacks, such as the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, is well reported, but racial murder by blacks is little publicized. For example, in Wilkinsburg, near Philadelphia, 39-year-old Ronald Taylor killed three men and wounded two others in a 2000 rampage, in which he targeted whites. At one point, he pushed a black woman out of his way, saying “Not you, sister. I’m not going to hurt any black people. I’m just out to kill all white people.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
Some of Batista’s followers intimidated jailed and even killed political opponents. One of the pro-Batista paramilitary thugs was Rolando Arcadio Masferrer Rojas, who was born in Holguín on July 12, 1918. He had been a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, organized in 1936 by the Communist International during the Spanish Civil War. Returning to Cuba, Masferrer became a staunch supporter of Batista, who at that time had the backing of the Communist Party. Masferrer was by no means the average run of the mill thug and, in addition to being a lawyer, he ran for office and won a seat in the Cuban Senate. He was also a guerrilla leader, political activist, a member of the Cuban Communist Party, a newspaper publisher, and responsible for the founding of “Los Tigres de Masferrer,” a guerrilla organization he organized to support Batista militarily. He also published two newspapers, Tiempo in Havana and Libertad in Santiago de Cuba. Becoming a radical anti-communist, he was ousted from the Cuban Communist Party. Regardless, Masferrer was a dangerous man and people learned to keep their mouths shut and play it low key when he was around. As a pro-Batista political activist, he took credit for supposedly attacking Castro’s rebels in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Actually, in most cases his group of not-so-fierce fighters stayed safely within the city limits of Santiago de Cuba, extorting money from the residents. In 1959, after Castro’s entry into Havana, Masferrer fled to the United States where he befriended American union bosses such as Jimmy Hoffa and got to know Mafia leaders such as Santo Trafficante in Tampa, Florida. Masferrer worked with Richard Bissell of the Central Intelligence Agency, planning another assassination attempt on Castro. He was seen at a ranch owned by multi-millionaire Howard Hughes, where he was training paid assassins, and he even met with President Kennedy in Washington. With money contributed by fellow Cubans living in Florida, he later planned to carry out the assassination of Fidel Castro by attacking him from a distant base in Haiti. It all ended when, on October 31, 1975, Masferrer was killed by a car bomb in Miami. Although his figures may be somewhat exaggerated, Castro claimed that Masferrer was responsible for the death of as many as 2,000 people during the Batista era.
Hank Bracker
Death is tireless. It devotes every second to its vile task: the execution of living creatures. A poet - a Biocosmist poet, that is - is both an activist and a singer in a band in revolt against death and the dictatorship of space. A Biocosmist poet creates his living organisms on the subjects of immortality, space travel, and the resurrection of the dead. How can he become an idolater when he destroys every temple and altar? Should he wade through a mire of pretty deeds, sit out office hours, or trade in trinkets when he should be be tearing half-witted brains apart in order to sow the seeds of Biocosmism within them? How can he saunter peaceably along with his eyes shut when he should, in fact, be armed to the teeth with telescopes? Should he nod off whimpering miserably when he is being summoned by the supreme creation of which no creator, no enthusiastic brain, has as yet even dreamed?
Alexander Svyatyogor
For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government war presidents.
Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture)
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), the considerably influential Swiss-French political thinker, activist and writer on political theory and religion,708 whose ideas influenced the liberal movement in Spain, the liberal revolution in Portugal in 1820, the Greek war of independence soon after, and revolutionary movements stretching from Belgium, to Poland to as far as Brazil and Mexico over the same period also had his views on the matter. The only short text that he wrote before his death on the expedition of Algiers, while wishing for the victory of French forces and refusing ‘to respect the quality of sovereignty in a barbarian’, the Dey of Algiers, castigated the expedition as a political ploy on the eve of a crucial general election.709 But Constant, after dismissing the quarrel between Charles X and the Dey as an ‘affaire d’honneur’, declared that he would support the expedition ‘if it led to the ‘colonization’ of the Regency: for it to become an ‘affaire nationale’, he contended, ‘an undisputed, indisputable colonization should be the prize of victory and the fruit of the sacrifices risked’ by the Bourbon regime.710 Constant final hours on this earth must have been filled with glee as the news of the French entry into Algeria reached him on his death- bed. Pro or anti Regime, all welcomed the news of the expedition.
S.E al Djazairi Salah E (French Colonisation of Algeria: 1830-1962, Myths, Lies, and Historians, Volume 1)
The Great Superstition (Sonnet) Fundamentalists radicalize children for illegal terrorism, nationalists radicalize children for legal terrorism, I radicalize children for peace-n-oneness, using only their brain and backbone, without spilling the blood of human. Only leeches live by guns and call it honor, brainwashed by the witchcraft of patriotism. Fundamentalism, nationalism, these are the real witchcraft, still practiced by modern savages. Teachers, coppers, politicians, civil servants, all (most) mindlessly carry the paradigm of death. Give me a hundred humanitarian hearts, I'll wipe out the very concept of war. Pack your flags with other talismans, there is no greater superstition than the superstition of nation.
Abhijit Naskar (Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim)
Dworkin was molested or raped at around age 9; the details, in her writing, and according to her closest friends, are murky, but something bad happened then. In 1965, when Dworkin was 18 and a freshman at Bennington College, she was arrested after participating in a march against the Vietnam War and was taken to the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village, where she was subjected to a nightmarish internal exam by prison doctors. She bled for days afterward. Her family doctor looked at her injuries and cried. Dworkin’s response to this incident was her first act of purposeful bravery: she wrote scores of letters to newspapers detailing what had happened, and the story was reported in the New York Times, among other papers, which led to a government investigation of the prison. It was eventually torn down, and in its place today is the idyllic flower garden at the foot of the Jefferson Market clock tower on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Like many members of the women’s liberation movement, Dworkin started out as an antiwar activist and found her way to feminism when she became disillusioned with the men of the New Left. She wrote about the experience in Mercy, a book of “fiction” about a girl named Andrea, who, like Dworkin, was from Camden, New Jersey, and was molested at around 9, protested the war, and was jailed and sexually assaulted in a New York City prison. “I went to the peace office and instead of typing letters for the peace boys I wrote to newspapers saying I had been hurt and it was bad and not all right and because I didn’t know sophisticated words I used the words I knew and they were very shocked to death; and the peace boys were in the office and I refused to type a letter for one of them because I was doing this and he read my letter out loud to everyone in the room over my shoulder and they all laughed at me, and I had spelled America with a 'k’ because I knew I was in Kafka’s world, not Jefferson’s, and I knew Amerika was the real country I lived in.
Ariel Levy (Intercourse)
Yesterday's world was obsessed with swords, today's world is obsessed with guns, tomorrow's world will be obsessed with AI, and it always ends up with death and destruction. Day after tomorrow it'll be business as usual, savage world will be back obsessing with fire, then again with swords, then guns, and so on, till the sky pours ashes and seas boil over.
Abhijit Naskar (Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood)
choke on my scrambled eggs and take a sip of water. The number one rule of fight club is I don’t tell our authors about my past. Doug is to my right at the small table in a hotel restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama, across from the offices of the Equal Justice Initiative. Bryan Stevenson, one of the country’s leading social justice activists and lawyers, and one of the authors we represent, sits across the table, and we’re catching up and having a nice breakfast before meeting Anthony Ray Hinton for the first time. Hinton had spent thirty years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he didn’t commit. We flew to Alabama at Bryan’s request, to meet Mr. Hinton and potentially help him with his book. I want desperately to be his cowriter. I take a deep breath. Montgomery’s air is humid, thick with its history of slavery and oppression and the fight for civil rights. I wasn’t prepared to talk about my crimes, my incarceration, my shame, and my work with others in recovery and incarcerated women who are reentering society. But I understand why Doug has asked me to share my story. While almost a year in Santa Cruz County Jail doesn’t compare to thirty years on death row, I know the pain of being alone. I know the sound of a door closing that you have no power to open yourself. I know about being judged. I know Ray before I’ve even met him, and I know that of all the books I’ve worked on, this is the book I was meant to do.
Lara Love Hardin (The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing)
More people will starve to death because of this decision, taken in the halls of power far away from where the starvation will happen, taken by people who will never be held responsible for any of it, who will live out the rest of their lives in total comfort. And should some activist interrupt their night out at a restaurant to show them pictures of the children they’ve helped kill, they will be deeply offended. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely.
Omar El Akkad (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This)
The afternoon of September 26 was chilly and overcast. On the cusp of sunset, several hundred people, most of them white, were milling around the limestone pavilion on the park’s north side. Montaug, that legendary doorman with the soul of an activist, had indeed drawn a crowd. Many had come because of David Wojnarowicz’s eye-catching flyer, which had been plastered on lampposts in the East Village: it depicted skeleton policemen beating a handcuffed Black man. Even Madonna showed up. “Everyone from the neighborhood was there,” recalled Kenny Scharf, who attended the protest with Keith Haring.
Elon Green (The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York)