Our foreparents were mostly brought from West Africa.... We were brought to America and our foreparents were sold; white people bo...ught them; white people changed their names ... my maiden name is supposed to be Townsend, but really, what is my maiden name? What is my name?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our presidents have been getting to be synthetic monsters, the work of a hundred ghost- writers and press agents so that it is get...ting harder and harder to discover the line between the man and the institution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I dont think there is anything on earth more wonderful than those wistful incomplete friendships one makes now and then in an hour...'s talk. You never see the people again, but the lingering sense of their presence in the world is like the glow of an unseen city at night--makes you feel the teemingness of it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Isn't it curious how completely ignorant we all are of the most important part of our bodily mechanism. It is really criminal. Yet... there is no nation in the world that doesnt surround sex with fantastic walls. Of course ours are sillier than any--but not much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Gospel of the army is cunning, as of all other human activities. The wisdom of the snake under the meekness of the sheep is wh...at wins out. The first Commandment is--never let them get anything on you-- The second: Graft--get privileges others haven't got--worm yourself into confidence The Third--seem neat and prosperous--as if you had money in the bank--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the way--about Bolshevism: one has to remember that all that is published in the press is propaganda, that the Bolsheviki are t...he moderate social-revolutionaries, a political party, and the Soviets are a system of government based on the idea of "pure democracy" (Mso called in the textbooks on gov't) that every man shall take direct part in the government of the country--which is arrived at by industrial representation through the heirarchy of soviets, and that much the same system would be in vogue in America--(geographical instead of industrial units) if Hamilton and the rest had taken the New England town-meeting as the unit of government instead of importing Montesquieu's ideas. It's silly to idealize things in Russia, but it is criminal to condemn them unheard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The one thing that enslaves people more than any other to the servitude of war is nationalism--the patriotic cant--Religious cant ...is feeble; its on a down slope fighting to hold territory--but the patriotism--all the noxious influences of the world seem to have thrown their tentacles about it--Its the mask of all the trade-greed & the glory-breed--and the asininity that makes people insist on sacrificing themselves on the nearest altar--no matter how brazen the God above it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was so long since I'd seen masses of young men that I'd forgotten how much pleasanter men of between twenty and thirty were to ...be around with than older men. It isnt so true of women. When I was in my twenties I thought the grown adults I ran into were a disaster and now I know I was right.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting o...ut at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail a...nd to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »