My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes d...iscuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel--not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years t...hat some political movement might tend to the betterment of the human lot, little remains above ground but the tattered slogans of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of guerrilla warfare is to establish foci, or liberated areas, in the countryside and to set up small military units w...hich will gradually grow in strength, number and equipment--from squads to companies and regiments, eventually to divisions and armies, as in Yugoslavia and China during the Second World War--in order to fight battles against government troops. In the liberated areas, the guerrillas establish their own institutions, conduct propaganda and engage in other open political activities. None of this applies to terrorists, whose base of operations is in the cities, and who have to operate clandestinely in small units. Any major concentration would immediately expose them to retaliation by the government. The terrorists may be part of a political movement that engages in propaganda and other political activities (such as the IRA and the Basque ETA), but there is a strict division of labor between the legal and the military arms of the movement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is a dangerous trend observable in some quarters of the Movement to program Sapphire out of her "evil" ways into a cover...-up, shut-up, lay-back-and-be-cool obedience role. She is being assigned an unreal role of mute servant that supposedly neutralizes the acidic tension that exists between Black men and Black women. She is being encouraged--in the name of revolution no less--to cultivate "virtues" that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have no connections here; only gusty collisions, rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.... ... I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn, a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement. People want to push the buttons and see me glow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What stunned me was the regular assertion that feminists were "anti-family." . . . It was motherhood that got me into the movement... in the first place. I became an activist after recognizing how excruciatingly personal the political was to me and my sons. It was the women's movement that put self-esteem back into "just a housewife," rescuing our intelligence from the junk pile of "instinct" and making it human, deliberate, powerful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we are not dreamers or fanatics; and we know that the ballot when we get it, will achieve for woman no more than it has achiev...ed for man.... The ballot is not even half the loaf; it is only a crust--a crumb. The ballot touches only those interests, either of women or men, which take their root in political questions. But woman's chief discontent is not with her political, but with her social, and particularly her marital bondage. The solemn and profound question of marriage ... [ellipsis in source] is of more vital consequence to woman's welfare, reaches down to a deeper depth in woman's heart, and more thoroughly constitutes the core of the woman's movement, than any such superficial and fragmentary question as woman's suffrage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a move...ment that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »