Uprising Quotes

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

How I go to the wood Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

For a group of people who claimed to be concerned for her safety, they did seem to have developed rather a habit of encouraging uprisings against monarchs.

Love can crystallize things. When love is in the air, distressing rain can become a wonderful avalanche of shimmering diamonds. Raindrops are transformed into a flood of sparkling crystal pearls. The power of love can convert rain into a multitude of glittering prisms. The mental seduction of love and a boundless illusion, inflamed by a profound uprising emotion, can change any ordinary incident into a radiant, luminous voyage. ( "Crystallization under an umbrella" )

‎What is to prevent, say, an uprising?

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

The air's warm with hopeful hints of spring in it. Spring would be a good time for an uprising, I think. Everyone feels less vulnerable once winter passes.

When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.

Out- out are the lights- out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

fuck the idea of staying calm. there’s no such thing as a kind uprising. there are no “please”s, no “thank you”s, & no justice without yelling.

In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.

... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.

The first bud of spring sings the other seeds into joining her uprising.

Dramatic uprising of stupidity can start from nowhere and only be seen when it reaches it's climax.

Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against. There is an inner uprising that leads to rebellion, however short- lived. It may be only momentary but it takes place. That space within oneself where resistance is possible remains.

It's hard to wipe your eyes when you have whirring buzzsaws for hands.

We can't continue treating people like monsters and then wondering why they have so few reservations about doing monstrous things.

The media wants to call them riots, but they’re uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don’t behave and they get all the rights they want.

Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.

They will not force us They will stop degrading us They will not control us We will be victorious

I mean, what if they're us from the future?" "And it's like The Terminator, right?" I said, rolling my eyes. "They've come to stop the uprising of the machines. Or maybe they are the machines. Maybe it's Skynet.

The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.

See! A hot guy kissed me and I didn’t even care because I love you so much!

* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.

Hayden shouts, "To the new Teen Uprising!

Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have to chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings and buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay or disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead, when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

She once led this secret uprising to switch the voice boxes of Barbies and G.I. Joes. When they hit the shelves, G.I. Joe said, 'Let's go shopping!' and Barbie said, 'The enemy must be overtaken.' I laugh. "No way." "Yes way. Sex-role stereotyping in children's toys, all that.

Margo, they're afraid of us. They're afraid of everything.' And then I kept on talking without really thinking, until it turned into a chant: They're afraid of change, and we must change. They're afraid of the young, and we are the young. They're afraid of music, and music is our life. They're afraid of books, and knowledge, and ideas. They're most afraid of our magic.

Amazing, Yetta thought. Back home I couldn't have chosen my own husband. And here I'm thinking about choosing presidents, governors, mayors, laws...

To be apathetic is literally to be without passion.

Would you have joined the Circle. Would you have stood by Valentine's side at the Uprising? Raise your hand, if you think it's possible." Simon was unsurprised to see not a single hand in the air. He'd played this game back in mundane school, every time his history class covered World War II. Simon knew no one ever thought they would be a Nazi. Simon also knew that, statistically, most of them were wrong.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments." [On Water]

We can always do something to fight back. We have the power to change the evils in the world. We’ve been knocked down for far too long. Now let’s rise.

Your downfall is a preparation for your up-rise. If you don’t know this secret, you will remain on the floor, blaming your legs instead of your head!

We will not be stupid girls. We will not be powerless girls. We will not be useless girls

3. “Well, little sister, you’ll be pleased to hear that your treacherous uprising has been quashed before it could really begin,” he said. “The heads of nine of your region’s lords decorate what remains of Slat’s walls. Your pretty little town is no more. Silson has razed it to the ground. I was tempted to add your pretty head to those of your fellow conspirators, but Aaron has persuaded me to be lenient.

Whatever it is, don't do it!" said Catarina. "It's a bad idea." "And why do you say that?" "Because they're the only kind you have," she said. " I have known you a long time, and I am absolutely certain on this subject. If you are planning on becoming a pirate again, its a bad idea." "I don't repeat my mistakes,"Magnus said, offended. "You're right. You make all new and even worse mistakes," Catarina told him. "don't do it, whatever it is. Don't lead a werewolf uprising, don't do anything that might contribute to the apocalypse, and don't start your own line of glitter and try to sell it at Sephora

[In case of zombie uprising] Marxists and Feminists would likely sympathize more with zombies. To Marxists, the undead symbolize the oppressed proletariat. Unless the zombies were all undead white males, feminists would likely welcome the posthuman smashing of existing patriarchal structures.

No sooner are her glass toes thrust into the mud grave than the revolutions begin. Uprisings, fire and steel. The prince is lynched in the ballroom with the dead girl's hair. Royalty's a thing of the past. The kingdom chooses their monarch. Naturally, they elect a wolf.

But see, amid the mimic rout A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out- out are the lights- out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

And you, trying to look all innocent walking in here. You’re a real conch at this, aren’t ya?” “Did you just insult me, Miguel?” Sherry asked, putting her hands on her hips but she looked on the verge of laughing. “No, love, it means smart.” He grinned at her.

For decades, Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.... The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawoof toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.

Because revolution—armed uprising—requires not only dissatisfaction but aggressiveness. A revolutionist has to be willing to fight and die—or he’s just a parlor pink. If you separate out the aggressive ones and make them the sheep dogs, the sheep will never give you trouble.

We turned our attention back to Jeff, who just started his interrogation of Polly, who looked horrendous. I didn’t mean that in a hateful way. She really did look awful. Like someone took the sick-and-pale stick and beat her senseless with it.

The first and most important step in the process of becoming genuinely is to be once again authenticated by the original designer.

Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.

It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays--I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. […] It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Conspiracies existed, to be sure; many of them, and many were dark indeed. But fiendish? Fiendishness required brains. Nine times out of ten, conspirators behaved like buffoons and wound up exposing themselves out of sheer, bumbling incompetence.

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.

The Solution After the uprising of the 17th of June The Secretary of the Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

Oookay, but for the record, I’m not really thrilled about punching some Lighter’s junk.

It was funny how normal things seemed to go on even when everything was so messed up. People could still fall in love, even at the end of the world.

Attitude is an accurate monitor of where we fall on the spectrum of pride and humility.

Why after the dust settles, someone has to come by and blow at it, stirring it up into the air again?

Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer's uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green Movement, not another round of useless sanctions.

Just as, all too often, some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising, the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion, rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms but then, if they chance to see a man among them, one whose devotion and public service lend him weight, they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as he rules their furor with words and calms their passion.

After all, I got you in the end, didn’t I?” “Nuhuh, I got you,” Merrick whispered in my ear.

Jeez. I was a feelings prostitute!

Cherubs are so creepy, don’t you think? Like, why are naked babies shooting poisonous arrows at innocent people a symbol of love? Why aren’t they a symbol of toddler anarchy instead?” “Roux,” I started to say, but then I paused, thinking about her comment. “That is an excellent point,” I admitted. “I blame Hallmark,” she said. “Damn them and their anarchist baby uprising.

And what is my definition of feminism? It is not what we have between our legs but what we have between our ears. It’s a philosophical posture and an uprising against male authority. It’s a way of understanding human relations and a way to see the world. It’s a commitment to justice and a struggle for the emancipation of women, the LGBTQIA+ community, anyone oppressed by the system, including some men, and all others who want to join. Welcome! The greater our number the better.

Drunken party friends can still kiss, right?” His voice was low and rumbling and I heard my breath catch as I fought to steady my voice. “We’re not drunk.” “You didn’t answer my question,” he breathed. I licked my lips again subconsciously and once again regretted it as I saw his eyes watching me intently. He probably thought I was doing it on purpose to taunt him. “Um.

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind.

The story begins like so much else,' she says slowly, 'With hope. Hope and dreams and daring...

There is nothing about our duties that necessitates like or dislike. You have your purpose and I have mine. That’s the end of the matter.

We can fight fire with water provided we can get it there soon enough. But often we act when it's too late. The result is splattered in the pages of our history: bloodbaths, uprisings, revolutions, you name. And on it goes. We learn so slowly. After so many centuries, we're still a people who eat fire and drink water.' 'Why bother,then?' 'Because we have to believe that one day we'll learn.

Rowan swallowed once. Twice. "There was... there was an uprising at the Calaculla labor camp," he said. Her heart stumbled on a beat. "After Princess Nehemia was assassinated, they say a slave girl killed her overseer and sparked an uprising. The slaves seized the camp." He took a shallow breath. "The King of Adarlan sent two legions to get the slaves under control. And they killed them all.

I saw you then and felt nothing. Saw you months later during the ghoul uprising and felt nothing then, too ... until I watched you tear through a group of ghouls 'til they were no more than blood in the wind. Made me so hard, I almost tripped over my cock on my way to kill the ghoul in front of me." "Romantic," I said in an acerbic tone, but a fluttering had started inside that I was having a difficult time controlling. A quick grin. "Indeed. Felt nothing when you rudely interrupted my orgy, either, except rage when I recognized you as the Guardian who'd been at Katie's supposed execution. Then we fought ... and I felt the same thing I'd felt when I watched you tear through those ghouls years before." "Something long and hard?" I supplied, adding, "I remember it hitting my foot when I was trying to hold you down." "Not that, though that, too," he said with another unrepentant grin. Then it faded as he said, "I felt that you were mine.

There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

They came and they left. You cried, but you stood your ground. You stayed tethered to hope as well as committed to dignified dreams and little victories of day-to-day life. You felt different. Then you started to change. Your smile returned with reticence before completely taking over your face. Today, you are no longer afraid to let that smile be there, and now you understand it was not about them. It was never about anyone else. This was about you from the day you were born. This was about you learning to love yourself— not letting the inferiority of the external corrupt the piety of the internal. This was your personal revolution. This was the uprising of your lifetime. And you won.

Returning to life was not easy, for joy had to find its long unused paths again.

Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions,

The true enemy of good isn't evil, but fear. Evil will battle good, but fear will corrupt it. — a Merraban saying, quoted by Admiral Pachelbel

Every day I find myself living more and more in the gray. Nothing is easy. Nothing is black-and-white.

We're not all good," I reply. "And they're not all bad." He lifts his eyebrow. "I suppose that is the simplest truth of all.

Endovier?” It was a fool’s plea. Slowly, so slowly, Rowan shook his head. “Once he got word of the uprising in Eyllwe, the King of Adarlan sent two other legions north. None were spared in Endovier.” She did not see Rowan’s face when he gripped her arms as if he could keep her from falling into the abyss. No, all she could see were the slaves she’d left behind, the ashy mountains and those mass graves they dug every day, the faces of her people, who had worked beside her—her people whom she had left behind. Whom she had let herself forget, had let suffer; who had prayed for salvation, holding out hope that someone, anyone would remember them.

Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the “get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson] Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand. “If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia senator Robert Byrd.42

Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It's rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only release the monster- a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice.

A lot happens when the prince and princess live happily ever after--the king, his father, dies, so he is now ruler and she his queen, they have their children, she conducts discreet affairs with Sir Lancelot, there are border uprisings...but still the story ended when the love toward which their destinies drove them came to mutual consciousness when they knew, each knowing the other knew, that they were meant for each other.

You have no concept of fairness, apart from your desire to have your own way. I suggest you put that notion from your head, because despite what you believe, the realms will not cater to your whims, and neither will I.

After the alarm caused by Nat Turner's insurrection had subsided, the slaveholders came to the conclusion that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep them from murdering their masters.

Settler colonialism, which is what this is, is by far the worst kind of imperialism, because it gets rid of the native population. Other kinds of imperialism exploit them, but settler colonialism eliminates them, “exterminates” them, to use the words of the Founding Fathers.

And yet the most jarring part of the grassroots anti-extraction uprising has been the rude realization that most communities do appear to lack this power; that outside forces—a far-off central government, working hand-in-glove with transnational companies—are simply imposing enormous health and safety risks on residents, even when that means overturning local laws. Fracking, tar sands pipelines, coal trains, and export terminals are being proposed in many parts of the world where a clear majority of the population has made its opposition unmistakable, at the ballot box, through official consultation processes, and in the streets.

With no small amount of swagger, Gavin Greyling said, "I remember Gavin fucking Guile, who won the False Prism's War, who outwitted the Thorn Conspirators and ended the Red Cliff Uprising. Gavin Guile, who brought low pirate kings and bandit lords, who ended the Blood Wars with wits and one deadly wave of his hand, who brought justice to the Seven Satrapies. Gavin Guile, who hunted wights and criminals, who built Brightwater Wall in less than a week, who aborted the birth of gods, destroyed at least two bane, and killed a god full fledged at Ruic Head. Gavin Guile, who faced a sea demon and lived, saving all the people of Garriston and the Blackguard, too. Gavin Guile, who sank Pash vecchio's great ship Gargantua with a rat. Gavin Guile, who armed us for war and gave the Blackguard the seas entire with ou sea chariots and hull wreckers. Gavin Guile, heart of our heart, our Promachos, the one who goes before us in war, who came and conquered and will come again.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time." And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness...: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the corking care of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:- "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain. " ... "Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

When calling for authenticity, we need to take seriously the brokenness and sinfulness of the human heart. If to be authentic means to be who we really are or to express what we really feel, then in most cases I’m going to vote for hypocrisy. Our prisons are filled with men and women who acted on their feelings and impulses. If authenticity is about being true to yourself, these individuals should be our models of inspiration.

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.

Speak," said my Master, "and be not afraid   Of speaking, but speak out, and say to him   What he demands with such solicitude." Whence I: "Thou peradventure marvellest,   O antique spirit, at the smile I gave;   But I will have more wonder seize upon thee. This one, who guides on high these eyes of mine,   Is that Virgilius, from whom thou didst learn   To sing aloud of men and of the Gods. If other cause thou to my smile imputedst,   Abandon it as false, and trust it was   Those words which thou hast spoken concerning him." Already he was stooping to embrace   My Teacher's feet; but he said to him: "Brother,   Do not; for shade thou art, and shade beholdest." And he uprising: "Now canst thou the sum   Of love which warms me to thee comprehend,   When this our vanity I disremember, Treating a shadow as substantial thing.

The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties—both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances—but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way—all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organisation—an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions.

The white neighborhoods of Johannesburg were built on white fear—fear of black crime, fear of black uprisings and reprisals—and as a result virtually every house sits behind a six-foot wall, and on top of that wall is electric wire. Everyone lives in a plush, fancy maximum-security prison. There is no sitting on the front porch, no saying hi to the neighbors, no kids running back and forth between houses. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood for hours without seeing a single kid. I’d hear them, though. They were all meeting up behind brick walls for playdates I wasn’t invited to. I’d hear people laughing and playing and I’d get off my bike and creep up and peek over the wall and see a bunch of white kids splashing around in someone’s swimming pool. I was like a Peeping Tom, but for friendship. It was only after a year or so that I figured out the key to making black friends in the suburbs: the children of domestics." (from "Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" by Trevor Noah)

All were expecting to die, and every day of their life was a day of suffering and torment. All had witnessed terrible crimes, and the Germans would have spared none of them; the gas chambers awaited them. Most, in fact, were sent to the gas chambers after only a few days of work, and were replaced by people from new contingents. Only a few dozen people lived for weeks and months, rather than for days and hours; these were skilled workers, carpenters and stonemasons, and the bakers, tailors and barbers who ministered to the Germans' everyday needs. These people created an Organizing Committee for an uprising. It was of course, only the already-condemned, only people possessed by an all-consuming hatred and a fierce thirst for revenge, who could have conceived such an insane plan. They did not want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka. And they destroyed it.

M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic. Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won’t listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.

Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count with no one saying, “Enough!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs and our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us from the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.

The Conqueror Worm Lo! 'tis a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly— Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo! That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore, By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And the angels sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

I think Attica brings to mind several things. The first is the basic inhumanity of man to man, the veneer of civilization as we sit here today in a well-lit, reasonably well appointed room with suits and ties on objectively performing an autopsy on this day, yet cannot get at the absolute horror of the situation, to people, be they black, yellow, orange, spotted, whatever, whatever uniform they wore, that day tore from them the shreds of their humanity. The veneer was penetrated. After seeing that day I went home and sat down and spoke with my wife and I said for the first time being a somewhat dedicated amateur army type, I could understand what may have happened at My Lai.

In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this. James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this. If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of "the wealth of the nation," those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participation too much - voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.