Milan Kundera: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” ⁂

“Imagine how strong our country could be if Congress spent their days working for the people who elected them, not the people who bought them.” ⁂

“I’m starting to realise that one of the purest forms of love is consideration. When someone thinks about how things would make you feel. In any situation how much they care about you is found in how much they consider you.” ⁂

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA, and others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing. ⁂

Bayard Rustin: “Let us be enraged about injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.” ⁂

m1masroom: did ya’ll grow up terrified to share your most basic interests, hobbies and tastes with family/friends out of fear of getting ridiculed and mocked or are you normal ⁂

When you talk to someone, but you’re really speaking to a third person indirectly, you call that third party the super addressee. ⁂

“I release myself from the versions of me created just to survive.” ⁂

Governor JB Pritzker: “Here’s the problem with the do-nothing crowd now telling us what to do: while they spent their years watching Republicans illegitimately pack the Supreme Court, take away voting rights from people of color, and systematically chip away at the constitutional order, all the while they offered only a simple defense of norms and decorum — in a blind hope that one day soon Republicans would wake up to find their better angels. That got us exactly where we are today. The reckoning is here. And now that this culture of timidity is on full display, these same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on the defense of Black people, trans kids, and immigrants, instead of on their own lack of guts and gumption.” (continued)

Marwan Makhoul: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds - and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.” ⁂