Stayin’ awake – and other quotes
“When evil people burn and bomb, good people must build and bind. Where evil people would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good people must seek to bring into being a real order of justice.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
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“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. . . . “Today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change… “The line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often it feels as though you were moving backward, and you lose sight of your goal; but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by… “A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community
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“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Karl Marx
Theses on Feuerbach
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“Reform tends to come when reformers join the democratic process. . .
“So long as an NGO – which could be defined as a corporation of social reformers – remains outside the democratic system, it has no real political levers. Its activists are not there, in the people’s chamber, to clarify the cause. And there is no practical link between the problem they are devoted to – no matter how obvious the problem – and the real action required to deal with it.”
John Ralston Saul
Baldwin-Lafontaine Lectures
