Author: ppadmin

The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free. — Utah Phillips

They saw some things in me I have not yet seen in myself. — Ron Kennedy, a formerly homeless veteran, now the intake coordinator at the Veterans Restoration Quarters, Asheville, NC

You think OWS [Occupy Wall Street] is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in DC in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We’re not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history. And he and his ilk spend heavily on campaigns to make sure no one stops them—the US Chamber of Commerce gave more money [to political candidates] than the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee last cycle, and 94% of it went to climate deniers. — Bill McKibben

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to. — Stephen Colbert

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Truth without love kills, but love without truth lies. — Eberhard Arnold

To love at all is to be vulnerable. The only places outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. — C.S. Lewis

It is freeing to become aware that we do not have to be victims of our past and can learn new ways of responding. But there is a step beyond this recognition. . . . It is the step of forgiveness. Forgiveness is love practiced among people who love poorly. It sets us free without wanting anything in return. — Henri Nouwen

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to a single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. — Hannah Arendt

Alexander Dubcek, the government official turned hero of the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, once said, “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.” As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream. — Rebecca Solnit