Velvet Revolution Quotes

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.

If I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality.

If Rubén was alive, she promised herself she’d waste no time finding him and nursing him back to health. And then they would leave the city together. She could become a modern adelita, caring for the sons of revolution, the guerilla fighters deep in the mountains. Rubén would have scars from this night, but he would wear them proudly.

I had been in law school in 1989. I recalled sitting alone in my basement apartment a few miles from Harvard Square, glued to my secondhand TV set as I watched what would come to be known as the Velvet Revolution unfold. I remember being riveted by those protests and hugely inspired. It was the same feeling I’d had earlier in the year, seeing that solitary figure facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square, the same inspiration I felt whenever I watched grainy footage of Freedom Riders or John Lewis and his fellow civil rights soldiers marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. To see ordinary people sloughing off fear and habit to act on their deepest beliefs, to see young people risking everything just to have a say in their own lives, to try to strip the world of the old cruelties, hierarchies, divisions, falsehoods, and injustices that cramped the human spirit—that, I had realized, was what I believed in and longed to be a part of.

Out of the fog that shrouded the countryside, softening the outlines of people and things, demonstrators emerged, flags waved and speakers rose spontaneously to address spontaneous gatherings. Mostly they were people who had not been allowed to speak for years. They clambered on to piles of rock, balanced on the rims of fountains and on pedestals of statues whose removal they demanded, just as they demanded the removal of those who had bowed down before these statues. They spun visions of how everyone's life, including Pavel's own, would quickly be transformed and rise above the poverty in which it had for so long been mired. Others, who preferred actions to words, climbed onto rooftops to remove the snow-covered symbols of yesterday's power. They pulled down street signs and fastened in their place new plaques scrawled with names that until recently had been unmentionable, and they sometimes gathered threateningly under the windows of abandoned Party secretariats, ready to break in and begin, or rather complete, the purging. In every face he saw a kind of ecstasy that looked almost sexual.

Twirling on the sand, she quotes Emma Goldman to him in a song. “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” He steps up. Come on, Gia, he says, be in my revolution. She is barefoot on the sand. Where are her stockings? She hasn’t taken them off; they’re not lying in a heap nearby. When his open palm goes around her waist, he can’t feel her corset, he feels velvet and under it the curve of her natural waist and lower back. Suddenly he has three left feet and, usually such a capable dancer, can’t move backward or forward. She steps on his awkward toes a few times, laughs, and they trip and fall to their knees on the sand. What’s gotten into you, Harry, she says. I can’t imagine, he says, his eyes roaming wildly over her flushed and eager face. Both his hands are entwining the narrow space from which her hips begin. It’s late afternoon on the wide Hampton beach; it’s gray and foggy when he kisses her. He’s never kissed Sicilian lips before, only Bostonian. There is a boiling ocean of contrast between the two. Boston girls were born and raised on soil that was frozen from October to April and breathed through perfectly colored mouths that took in chill winds and fog from the stormy harbor. But his Sicilian queen has roamed the Mediterranean meadows and her abundant lips breathed in fearsome fire from Typhonic volcanoes. He kisses her as if they are alone at night—as if she is already his. His arms wrap around her back and press her to him. They become suspended, he floats like a phantom around her in the moist air. He won’t let her go, he can’t.

In the 20th century after WWII, Ralph Burke Tyree led the transformation and appreciation of the South Pacific’s serene beauty with his art. Furthermore he was the premier artist in American iconic movement of the Tiki revolution which emanated from Hawaii and California. He likely painted thousands of different pieces, initially oils on board, mostly wahines, au naturale. Starting in 1960 he switched to oils on black velvet with the portraiture nudity, more demure or sometimes a silhouette in a jungle scene.

Sources of interest and excitement were not lacking during the season. If politics ran high, as in the years when revolution was preparing, society could gather at the capitol and listen to the classic oratory of Richard Henry Lee, or the fervid speeches of Patrick Henry, dressed in his suit of peach-blossom velvet, and defying King George, to the great alarm of the conservative land-owning gentry.

The truth is that our market economy is a finely tuned legal and moral system that has evolved over hundreds of years. It is not a natural condition, but an extremely sophisticated institutional construction, one that requires constant monitoring and enforcement. The system of property rights alone requires a massive legal-bureaucratic apparatus just to keep track of who owns what and who owes what to whom. Consumer protection laws, which establish the basic rules designed to ensure that competition remains “healthy,” are also an enormous legal apparatus. (It was estimated, for instance, that after the “velvet revolution,” the Czech Republic needed to pass eighty thousand pages of law in order to get its product standards up to minimum European Union levels.) Furthermore, the number of regulations must increase every time someone finds a more ingenious way of circumventing the old ones (in the same way that the number of rules governing sport increases every time someone finds a new way of cheating).

Obama was the Black velvet glove covering the white racist iron fist of U.S. imperialism and capitalism. Bush Junior was the iron fist. Ditto for Romney. That is why Obama won and Romney lost in 2012.

5. Community. At SoulBoom, our diverse community will embrace inclusion at every level—more on that in a little bit. Most importantly, however, our community will have a singular focus on empowering, training, and investing in children and youth. Our goal here is social revolution via spiritual transformation. Century after century, it has been youth who sparked the greatest revolutions in the world: the Arab Spring, the Velvet Revolution, the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the Tiananmen Square protests. All the way up to Black Lives Matter and the young women and students leading an uprising against oppression in Iran.

Each room in the house is devoted to a different living form. One is filled with velvets and feathers and make-up and sparkles and costumes and silks. It is where the faggots go when they want to transform themselves. Another room is for plants to live in; another is for quiet music; another is for silent eating; and another is for methodically drinking teas of healing herbs. All who live there move softly about the house, living all through it. At night they sleep all together in the central room of the house. The fire glows over the large pillows that cover the floor with the tribe covering the pillows.

Each room in the house is devoted to a different living form. One is filled with velvets and feathers and make-up and sparkles and costumes and silks. It is where the faggots go when they want to transform themselves. Another room is for plants to live in; another is for quiet music; another is for silent eating; and another is for methodically drinking teas of healing herbs. All who live there move softly about the house, living all through it. At night they sleep all together in the central room of the house. The fire glows over the large pillows that cover the floor with the tribe covering the pillows.

[In 2014] …far from Prague, the Library of Congress organized a special tribute on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution to honor the life and legacy of Havel and to unveil a bust of the man that would be placed inside the U.S. capitol. […] John McCain, the conservative senator, called Havel a great man, saying he epitomized the cutting edge of what led to the end of the Soviet empire.

It reminded Sade of some of the aristocrats, who had treated imprisonment as a bad joke, a mild annoyance that would be made right before any real damage was done. They had kept their dignity right up to the moment when the drum roll stopped and the blade fell. Then, too late, they screamed like children. As I would have done. The thought popped unwelcome into his head.

reform-minded general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful position in Russia, the Soviet satellites were moving toward independence. I was in Prague the night the Velvet Revolution separated Czechoslovakia from Moscow’s rule and spent time in Poland with the charismatic Lech Walesa, who led Solidarity. Nineteen eighty-nine was that kind of year. Earlier, in June, I finished a commencement address at Tulane University School of Medicine on a Saturday morning and got a call from our news desk: Chinese troops had moved on young urban protesters who had taken over Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital, demanding more political and personal freedom after a state visit from Gorbachev, who was reforming

I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality.