A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man... can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture--in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug... which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gain...s, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us ...European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A drug is neither moral nor immoral--it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being ...treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts--especially texts by black women. A working-class Jew...ish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them serio...usly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »