
Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear closing speech (2010)
Source: Frankenstein
Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear closing speech (2010)
“How many a thing which we cast to the ground,
When others pick it up, becomes a gem!”
St. 41.
Compare: "Once in a golden hour / I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed", Alfred Tennyson, The Flower.
Modern Love http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/modern_love.htm (1862)
On First Principles, Bk. 2, ch. 11; vol. 1, p. 148
On First Principles
“Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.”
Book I, Ch. 14
Essais (1595), Book I
“Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed.”
As quoted Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V, 140, 6 (Fragment 35)
D 6
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)
“How many times did I see our mother cry because she couldn't give us the bread that we asked for!”
Letter to his family (31 October 1931) http://www.skeptic.ca/Durruti.htm
Context: From my earliest years, the first thing that I saw was suffering. And if I couldn't rebel when I was a child, it was only because I was an unaware being then. But the sorrows of my grandparents and parents were recorded in my memory during those years of unawareness. How many times did I see our mother cry because she couldn't give us the bread that we asked for! And yet our father worked without resting for a minute. Why couldn't we eat the bread that we needed if our father worked so hard? That was the first question whose answer I found in social injustice. And, since that same injustice exists today, thirty years later, I don't see why, now that I'm conscious of this, that I should stop fighting to abolish it.
I don't want to remind you of the hardships suffered by our parents until we got older and could help out the family. But then we had to serve the so-called fatherland. The first was Santiago. I still remember mother weeping. But even more strongly etched in my memory are the words of our sick grandfather, who sat there, disabled and next to the heater, punching his legs in anger as he watched his grandson go off to Morocco, while the rich bought workers' sons to take their children's place …
Don't you see why I'll continue fighting as long as these social injustices exist?
Discussion with Ela Bhatt, Founder, Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA)