“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Edward Said24

Professor of English and literature 1935–2003

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“Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary (1970)
By Any Means Necessary (1970)

“Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary (1970)
By any means necessary: speeches, interviews, and a letter (1970)
Context: Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.

“We will continue to fight you as long as we have weapons in our hands.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

Audiotape aired on Al-Jazeera (18 October 2003) http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/world/0302/timeline.bin.laden.audio/content.13.html. <br class="br">2000s, 2003

“I try to encourage people to look at our past in a critical way because as our education, we have a great, great history. But in reality we are poorest in ethics and philosophy, so I try to raise people’s consciousness on how we deal with our past.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei, interview by Christiane Amanpour, 2010

“No choice we can make as a nation lies between our history and our geography. We can hardly change either of them. They are immutable. The only choice we can make as a nation is the choice about our future.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

"A Prospect of Europe", 1997 speech at the University of New South Wales.

“And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

54 min 55 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Journeys in Space and Time [Episode 8]
Context: Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.

“There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organised for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the communal madness and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of nonviolent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms. But I do not agree that our thirty years' probation in nonviolence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the nonviolence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) https://books.google.com/books?id=sswBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&dq=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6ydqTtK7LAhUI4D4KHW3-DwEQ6AEIHTAA by Pyarelal Nayyar, p. 326 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mahatma-gandhi-volume-ten.pdf <br class="br">1940s

“Right now we are being given the experience we need to raise our consciousness.”

Eckhart Tolle book A New Earth

A New Earth (2005)

“Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.

“None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together, but we have to create our history — our Yugoslavian socialist history, that is unique, in the future — that is our path; not touching the national rights of the some republics to preserve their own traditions, not at the expense of, but in the interest of the whole community, to mutually complete each other. That is what we want, and not the destruction of our unity.”

Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

Frequently quoted fragment of Tito's speech in Split 1962 Source: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7s7ldiX6lc <br class="br">Other

“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”

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Edward Said24

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