Quotes about blackness
page 12

“A little stallion gallops across the leafing fingers-
Black the gate leaps open, I sing;
How did we live here?”

Paul Celan (1920–1970) Romanian poet and translator

"Tallow Lamp" in: Paul Celan (1972) Selected poems. p. 22

“Glass… is not required for the collection of solar heat. The National Physical Laboratory of Israel… has perfected a highly polished metal surface coated with a molecular-thin black layer of special paint, which absorbs more than 90 percent sunlight. The polished metal radiates very little of the heat it receives. …A south-facing wall fitted out with these plates would really "drink in" solar heat, windows, or no windows.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Drink, Painting, Perfection

“I wear a lot of Axe body spray, but I live in a black neighborhood. Over there, they call it Ask body spray. If you don't get that joke, then you're not racist.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Saturday Night Live (March 12, 2011)

“The trial of the insurrectionists from Shuia, for opposing aid to the starving, should be carried out in utmost haste and should end not other than with the shooting of the very largest number of the most influential and dangerous of the Black Hundreds in Shuia, and, if possible, not only in this city but even in Moscow and several other ecclesiastical centers.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letter to Comrade Molotov for the Politburo (19 March 1922).
1920s

“My wife has just finished reading aloud your 'Life with a Black Regiment,' and you must allow me to thank you heartily for the very great pleasure which it has in many ways given us. I always thought well of the negroes, from the little which I have seen of them; and I have been delighted to have my vague impressions confirmed, and their character and mental powers so ably discussed. When you were here I did not know of the noble position which you had filled. I had formerly read about the black regiments, but failed to connect your name with your admirable undertaking. Although we enjoyed greatly your visit to Down, my wife and myself have over and over again regretted that we did not know about the black regiment, as we should have greatly liked to have heard a little about the South from your own lips.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume III, chapter IV: "The Publication of the 'Descent of Man', page 176 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=188&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=image; letter to Thomas Higginson (27 February 1873) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Life, Pleasure, Way, Reading

“White people scare the crap out of me… I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord… never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person bury my movie, and I've never heard a black person say, "We're going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here — have a nice day!"”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

[Stupid White Men ...and Other Excuses For the State of the Nation!, 2001, 0060392452, 49040476]
2001

People, Cars, Personality

“Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pursuit… right to life liberty and… A black moonless night; Jimmy Herf is walking alone up South Street. Behind the wharfhouses ships raise shadowy skeletons against the night. "By Jesus I admit I'm stumped," he says aloud. All these April nights combing the streets alone a skyscraper has obsessed him, a grooved building jutting up with uncountable bright windows falling onto him out of a scudding sky. Typewriters rain continual nickelplated confetti in his ears.”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), p. 365

Life, Happiness, Night

“You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure game (1985), published by Infocom.

School

“What was crucial to the partnership, it should be noted, is that Flavor Flav was a clown — in the tradition of the best black comics — yet he was a clown with consciousness, empowered with knowledge of self, an entirely different persona from the "Stepin Fetchit" and "Sambo" stereotypes of subservient and uncouth black Americans. Flavor Flav was and is a fool, but a fool on a mission. On the cover of Nation of Millions, he wears a gigantic clock as a medallion — a preposterous getup — yet it is designed to illustrate, through a comic medium, that time is indeed running out.”

Flavor Flav (1959) American rapper

Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (1996), p. 309.
About

Fools, Knowledge, Time, Partnership

“Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks. They didn't film The Deer Hunter there for nothing -- the state has the second-highest concentration of NRA members, behind Texas.”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

1986, while working on a gubernatorial race http://www.politico.com/story/2008/04/extreme-makeover-pennsylvania-edition-009323

“I thought it was so strange because I normally make these pitch-black studies of misanthropes or the occasional movie about serial killers, sowhat could the possibly see in this material for me.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

2011 Golden Globe Award Ceremony (2011)

Study

“I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section X, "The Evangelical Alliance."

God, Pain, Soul, Suffering

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life, Death, Pain, People

“But Shadrach was a name from the Bible. And now he wasn't sure that it was right to name a rabbit with a name from the Bible. Shadrach was one of the three young men that old Nebuchadnezzar in the old testament had tossed into the fiery furnace— Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. Suddenly he thought that Shadrach must be a good black name— Shadrach must have got pretty black in that fiery furnace. He didn't smile, because it wasn't right to joke about things from the Bible, and he still didn't know whether you should name a rabbit with a name from the Bible. It worried him.”

Meindert DeJong book Shadrach

Shadrach (1957)

Men, Smile

“Let me be transparent about my affection for cops. When you dial 911, whether you are white or black, the cops come, and they come quickly, and they come quickly whether they are white or black. That’s what cops do, in addition to all of the other hard and difficult and dangerous and frightening things that they do. They respond to homes in the middle of the night where a drunken father, wielding a gun, is threatening his wife and children. They pound up the back stairs of an apartment building, not knowing whether the guys behind the door they are about to enter are armed, or high, or both.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Children, Guy, Home, Night

“Still falls the Rain —
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss —
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

Still Falls the Rain (1940)

World, Loss

“I believe it is a mistake for Marxists to lose sight of the value of the Black feminist tradition--including the concept of intersectionality, both in its contribution to combatting the oppression of women of color, working-class women and the ways in which it can help to advance Marxist theory and practice.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Women, Color, Way, Help

“Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen… Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean friends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movements. The black wind of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve… Populations blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide… Any number can play…”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Atrophied Preface
Naked Lunch (1959)

Life, Death, Fear, Penalty

“The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

Tarzan Is an Expatriate, quoted in Patrick Marnham's Dispatches from Africa, ch. 1 (1981).

Country, Forgetting

“When I came here, you seldom saw a black player get together with a white player and go someplace together after a ball game. Now it is more common. Yes, there has been improvement but some things still remain the way they were. I cannot, for example, go up to a white player and say to him, "Are you for real?" or "Are you concerned with me at all?" But now, once in a while, they will come to you and ask you about it. They don't turn their backs on you like they used to.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Sports Parade"
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Way, Game

“Haig does not care how many men he loses. He just squanders the lives of these boys. I mean to save some of them in the future. He seems to think they are his property. I am their trustee. I will never let him rest. I will raise the subject again & again until I nag him out of it—until he knows that as soon as the casualty lists get large he will get nothing but black looks and scowls and awkward questions…I should have backed Nievelle against Haig. Nievelle has proved himself to be a Man at Verdun; & when you get a Man against one who has not proved himself, why, you back the Man!”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted in Frances Stevenson's diary entry (15 January 1917), A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A Diary (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 139
Prime Minister

Men, Boy, Question, Thinking

“There he lieth, tossing in the guilt of his lewdness, the primal lecher, neglectful of his duties to a fair wife but all too ready to plunge his sizzling steel into the slaking black mud of a base Indian.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Nothing Like the Sun (1964)

“Bolitho heard the blare of a trumpet and saw the sun gleam across black-plumed helmets and breast-plates as the horses changed formation and cantered into another wall of dust.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

A Tradition of Victory, Cap 7 "The Ceres"

Change, Sun, Horse

“Eons ago when your ancestors were defending their caves against the tiger and the mammoth, with crude spears of flint, the gold spires of my people split the stars! They are gone and forgotten, and the world is a waste of barbarians, white and black. Let me, too, pass as a dream that is forgotten in the mists of the ages…”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Moon of Skulls" (1930)

People, Age, World, Dreams

“Huge bodies of vapour—a storm in each—were hurrying over a sky, dashed alike with the hues of the tempest and the morning; some of the vapours were of inky blackness, others spread like a scroll of royal purple; some undulated with the light struggling through, others were of transparent whiteness; but those upon the east were of a deep crimson—and the round, red sun had just mounted above an enormous old cedar. Red hues were cast upon everything; even the lilies blushed, and the waters of the little fountain were like melted rubies…”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Light, Water, Sun

“They had this movie called Juno about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and it's nominated for an Oscar. That's an unusual experience for me, 'cause when a black girl gets pregnant it ain't no Oscar. It's social work and a box of condoms is what that is.”

D. L. Hughley (1963) American actor and comedian

Appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (January 17, 2008)

Girl, Box

“In the aftermath of the war, we find one of the most hidden eras of US history; and that is the period of radical reconstruction. It certainly remains the most radical era in the entire history of the United States of America. And this is an era that is rarely acknowledged in historical texts. … There were progressive laws passed challenging male supremacy. This is an era that is rarely acknowledged. During that era of course we had the creation of what we now call historically black colleges and universities and there was economic development. This period didn’t last very long. From the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, we might take 1865 as that day until 1877 when a radical reconstruction was overturned—and not only was it overturned but it was erased from the historical record—and so in the 1960s we confronted issues that should have been resolved in the 1860s. One hundred years later.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

War, Law, History, Universe

“Belinda lived in a little white house,
With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse,
And a little yellow dog and a little red wagon,
And a realio, trulio, little pet dragon.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Many Long Years Ago (1945), The Tale of Custard the Dragon

Dogs, Housing

“But I have to tell you what I saw... I had entered a dark room [in the city Tunis], lit by a small, elongated horizontal window,.. The light cut sharply.... and drew itself on the stone floor... There behind the table was sitting the Jewish scribe with his arms forward, leaning on the parchment. He turned his lordly head in my direction... It was a beautiful head, delicate and translucent pale as alabaster, large and small wrinkles were lining along the small eyes and around the big curved hawk nose. A black cap covered the white skull and a low white-yellow beard lay in large tufts over the written parchment... two crutches lay slantingly on the floor beside him. How much I desired to get my sketchbook out.... but in front of the staring gaze of the scribe, I didn't find the courage to carry out my intention.”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van de tekst van Jozef Israëls, in het Nederlands): Maar ik moet u vertellen wat ik zag.. Ik was een donkere ruimte binnengetreden, verlicht door een klein langwerpig horizontaal liggend raampje,.. .Scherp sneed het licht.. ..en tekende zich af op de stenen vloer.. .Daar zat achter de tafel de joodse wetschrijver met zijn armen voorover op het perkament geleund en draaide zijn vorstelijk hoofd naar mij toe;. ..Het was een prachtig hoofd, fijn en doorschijnend bleek als albast, rimpels, grote en kleine, liepen langs de kleine ogen en om de grote gekromde haviksneus. Een zwart kapje bedekte de witte schedel en een lage witgele baard lag in grote vlokken over het beschreven perkament.. ..twee krukken lagen naast hem schuin op de grond. Hoe gaarne had ik mijn schetsboek voor de dag gehaald,. ..maar voor de starende blik van de wetschrijver durfde ik mijn voornemen niet ten uitvoer te brengen.
Quote of Israëls from his text Spanje, een reisverhaal, publisher, Martinus Nijhoff, De Haag, 1899, p. unknown
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

Beauty, Courage, Light

“The Trump candidacy puts Democrats in an extremely awkward position. They are the party of elegance and fabulosity, but also claim to be the party of the “blacks and browns”—who see absolutely nothing wrong with Trump’s taste. Jay Z and Beyoncé may not like Trump’s positions, but, boy, they like his style. They’re asking themselves, How can a person of such taste be a Republican? He’s P. Diddy in the Hamptons, disturbing the neighbors with his parties.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2016, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016)

Boy, Personality

“filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too-short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It was too meagre for the many roofs, which remained black or rust coloured, shingled roofs like arks and thatched cottages, concealing within them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics—charred-black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists, dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of the Devil’s organs.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Birds” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/birds.htm His father, The seasons

Winter, Night

“I had started to become interested in the punk scene and started to dress differently than a lot of the kids in Grand Rapids, Michigan were dressing. And I got my nose pierced and I started to shave my head and dye my hair and wear a lot of black. And so I looked like somebody that might be arrested… I was a bit of a class clown, usually the one that people would get to do the things that they were afraid to get in trouble for… On graduation night, I was arrested… I had a boyfriend at the time who was a couple centuries older than I was and I'd convinced him that we should go and glue the locks of the school so that people couldn't get in the morning. And lo and behold, they had a security guard because it was graduation night and they were concerned that idiots like me might try and do something like that.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

On her teenage punk years and being arrested on graduation night — NPR "Gillian Anderson On 'The Fall' And Getting Arrested In High School" http://www.npr.org/2013/12/07/249240231/gillian-anderson-on-the-fall-and-getting-arrested-in-high-school/ (December 7, 2013) 2010s

People, School, Time, Night

“Even though I disagree with the tactics and the divisive rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, I do understand that hopelessness and lack of opportunity breeds this type of desperation. And this is true in many of our nation’s ghettos and underprivileged communities, much of the protests in urban city centers are born out of this kind of desperation. But the thing is — the way that we can solve the problem and to eliminate this kind of a desperation is to create good jobs, urban economic revitalization, and opportunities for job training and long-term solutions. That will solve the problem in our troubled cities around this country. And I want to make a loud cry that we as Republicans — we are declaring right now today, that we are determined more than ever to listen to the cries of the disenfranchised, the low-income, the at-risk communities. We are more than ever – we will solve the problems together!”

Mark Burns (televangelist) (1979) Christian pastor and founder of the NOW Television Network

Speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention (July 21, 2016)

Way, Communication, Understanding, Problem

“Much as I admire Tolkien, and I do admire Tolkien — he’s been a huge influence on me, and his Lord of the Rings is the mountain that leans over every other fantasy written since and shaped all of modern fantasy — there are things about it, the whole concept of the Dark Lord, and good guys battling bad guys, Good versus Evil, while brilliantly handled in Tolkien, in the hands of many Tolkien successors, it has become kind of a cartoon. We don’t need any more Dark Lords, we don’t need any more, ‘Here are the good guys, they’re in white, there are the bad guys, they’re in black. And also, they’re really ugly, the bad guys. It is certainly a genuine, legitimate topic as the core of fantasy, but I think the battle between Good and Evil is waged within the individual human hearts. We all have good in us and we all have evil in us, and we may do a wonderful good act on Tuesday and a horrible, selfish, bad act on Wednesday, and to me, that’s the great human drama of fiction. I believe in gray characters, as I’ve said before. We all have good and evil in us and there are very few pure paragons and there are very few orcs. A villain is a hero of the other side, as someone said once, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and that’s the interesting thing. In the case of war, that kind of situation, so I think some of that is definitely what I’m aiming at.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

AssignmentX interview (June 2011) http://www.assignmentx.com/2011/interview-game-of-thrones-creator-george-r-r-martin-on-the-future-of-the-franchise-part-2/

War, Truth, Guy, Mountain

“I was taking LSD periodically, every couple of months. I was in a strange state of mind, influenced by these visions. … I was trying to draw it in my sketchbook, and that began to coalesce into these comic strips that were stylistically based on grotesque, vulgar humor comics of the thirties and forties. … All of those characters came out of that crazy visionary period that I couldn’t shut off. It was spontaneous, but I was so crazy, I was really out of my mind, it was like schizophrenia. It was like what produces art by crazy people in a madhouse. Anything could be an influence, anything I heard. I was in Chicago in early ’66 and the radio was on, there was some tune playing, it was a black station, and this announcer said, That was Mr. Natural. I just started drawing Mr. Natural, this bearded guru-type character in my sketchbook, it just came out.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

"R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1" http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb, The Paris Review, Summer 2010, No. 193.

People, Art, Nature, Drawing

“.. Our life is a pilgrim's progress. I once saw a very beautiful picture: it was a landscape at evening. In the distance on the right-hand side a row of hills appeared blue in the evening mist. Above those hills the splendour of the sunset, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple. The landscape is a plain or heath covered with grass and its yellow leaves, for it was in autumn. Through the landscape a road leads to a high mountain far, far away, on the top of that mountain is a city wherein the setting sun casts a glory. On the road walks a pilgrim, staff in hand. He has been walking for a good long while already and he is very tired. And now he meets a woman, or figure in black, that makes one think of St. Paul's word: As being sorrowful yet always rejoicing. That Angel of God has been placed there to encourage the pilgrims and to answer their questions and the pilgrim asks her: Does the road go uphill then all the way? And the answer is: "Yes to the very end."”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote of Vincent van Gogh, from his 'First Sunday Sermon' http://www.vggallery.com/misc/archives/sermon.htm: 'I Am a Stranger on the Earth..'; 29 October 1876 1870s

Life, God, Beauty, Angels

“Something traumatic happened to me when I was younger. I was with this old black woman, and she was very wise, very Alice Walker, The Color Purple…she looked at me and she says, "Baby…you know I used to be able to fly but I can't fly no more, baby. But baby, you…? You too fat to fly."”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, Drunk With Power CD

Color, Baby, Flying

“Then said the people to the prophet: “Shall not black hills draw round in some forsaken land, to make a vale-wide cauldron wherein the molten rock shall seethe and roar, and where the crags of mountains shall be hurled upward to the surface and bubble and go down again, that there our enemies may boil for ever?”
And the prophet answered: “It is writ large about the bases of Pegāna’s mountains, upon which sit the gods: ‘Thine Enemies Are Forgiven.’””

Lord Dunsany book The Gods of Pegāna

The Gods of Pegāna, Pegāna

God, People, Mountain, Drawing

“A bell was rung. All the passengers came on deck. Never shall I forget the scene we then witnessed. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The sky was overspread with thick dark clouds. It looked like a vast temple at night, as the fitful, lurid sun cast a yellowish tinge resembling the pale light of the tapers near a catafalque. The foaming waves opened like immense tombs that seemed avid to swallow their first victim. When all was ready a porthole was opened, and a plank painted black, six feet long and three broad, was suspended over the deep. The body of a child, wrapped in a winding sheet, was placed upon it, with a large stone attached to the feet. For a minute or two the captain read -- I do not know what prayer. Profound silence reigned. The father scarcely shed a tear. The mother seemed quite unmoved. At a word spoken by the captain, the plank was raised in the air, and the next instant the light corpse glided into the waters. I made the Sign of the Cross over it, but alas, I do not know whether the child was even baptized. The passengers withdrew, apparently untouched by the scene, and some even smiled. How impiety deadens the heart!”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)

Smile, Tear, Light, Silence

“The great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more. The things that have really made me miss my train have always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the least afraid.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 61.

Life, Training

“By all means, argue against laws that prohibit victimless 'crimes' on the ground that these disproportionally ensnare blacks. But do not err in accusing all cops of targeting blacks, when the former are entrusted with enforcing the law, and the latter violate the law in disproportion to their numbers in the general population.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Ferguson: Angst vor einer militarisierten Polizei” http://jungefreiheit.de/kolumne/2014/ferguson-angst-vor-einer-militarisierten-polizei Junge Freiheit (in German), September 4, 2014. 2010s, 2014

Law

“We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back into a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.”

Henry L. Benning (1814–1875) Confederate Army general

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)

“Brexit was a chilling example of how truly intolerant and despicable the left in this country are. I know people whose own parents almost disowned them because they voted leave. I have probably received in the region of 300 death threats – mainly from Muslims who want to prove Islam is a “religion of peace” by killing me, as well as Black Lives Matter supporters. I now really enjoy the death threats because I post them all on social media and they allow me to illustrate how we are stupidly shaping society to cater for the most aggressive, hateful, bigots imaginable. The left denounces people like me as bigots for standing up for true liberal principles which made Western civilisation great in the first place.”

Paul Joseph Watson (1982) English YouTuber, radio host, writer, editor, and conspiracy theorist

"An interview with Paul Joseph Watson", The Tab (7 November 2016)

Death, Hate, People, Peace

“Oklahoma is nothing but vast wasteland; no place for black people.”

Charles Barkley (1963) American basketball player

As quoted in "Barkley: Oklahoma a vast wasteland" http://newsok.com/article/1757468 (10 February 2006), by Andrew Gilman, The Oklahoman

People

“There is no hard and fast rule as to what makes a successful state-owned enterprise. Therefore, when it comes to SOE management, we need a pragmatic attitude in the spirit of the famous remark by China’s former leader Deng Xiao-ping: 'it does not matter whether the cat is white or black as long as it catches mice.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 5, Black cat, white cat, p. 121

Cats, Success

“Even if you meet the perfect person, it ain't gonna be at the perfect time. You're married, they're single. That's right. You're Jewish, they're Palestinian. You're a Mexican, they're a raccoon. You're a black woman, he's a black man.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (HBO, 2004)

Time, Personality, Perfection

“There are many other evils in our country which are growing, whereas the practice of slavery is fast diminishing, and threaten to bring punishment on our land more immediately than the oppression of the blacks. That sacred regard to truth in which you and I were educated, and which is certainly taught and enjoined from on high, seems to be vanishing from among us. A general relaxation of education and government, a general debauchery as well as dissipation, produced by pestilential philosophical principles of Epicurus, infinitely more than by shows and theatrical entertainments; these are, in my opinion, more serious and threatening evils than even the slavery of the blacks, hateful as that is. I might even add that I have been informed that the condition of the common sort of white people in some of the Southern States, particularly Virginia, is more oppressed, degraded, and miserable, than that of the negroes. These vices and these miseries deserve the serious and compassionate consideration of friends, as well as the slave trade and the degraded state of the blacks. I wish you success in your benevolent endeavors to relieve the distresses of our fellow creatures, and shall always be ready to cooperate with you as far as my means and opportunities can reasonably be expected to extend.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1800s, Letter to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley (1801)

Hate, People, Truth, Education

“A black hole is the ultimate manifestation of a region of strong gravity. The pull of gravity in a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape from it and time stands still.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Source: Jayant Narlikar Black Holes http://books.google.com/books?id=8qi55iSSeiwC, National Book Trust, India, 1 January 2006

Light, Strong, Time

“Worpswede, Worpswede, Worpswede! [small rural village in North-Germany were a colony of German artists was working then, including Paula] My sunken Bell mood! Birches, birches, pine trees and old willows. Beautiful brown moors – exquisite brown! The canals with their black reflections, black as asphalt..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

Quote from her Journal, Worpswede 1897; as cited in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 192
1897

Beauty, Mood, Tree

“I am not the official Church Jesus who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioners, officers, church bosses, politicians and similar representatives of power. I am not your Superstar who keeps playing his part for you on the cross, and whom you hit in the face when he steps out of his role, and who therefore cannot call out to you, "I am fed up with all your pomp and all your rituals! Your incense is disgusting. It stinks of burnt human flesh. I can't bear your holy celebrations and holidays any longer. You can pray as much as you like, I'm not listening. Keep all your idiotic honours and laudations. I won't have anything to do with them. I do not want them. I am no pillar of peace and security. Security that you achieve with tear gas and with billy clubs. I am no guarantee for obedience and order either. Order and obedience at reform schools, prisons, penal institutions, insane asylums. I am the disobedient one, the restless one who does not live in any house. Nor am I a guarantee for success, savings accounts and possessions. I am the homeless one without a permanent home who stirs up trouble wherever he goes. I am the agitator, the invoker, I am the scream. I am the hippie, bum, Black Power, Jesus people. I want to free the prisoners. I want to make the blind see. I want to redeem the tortured. I want to cast love into your hearts, the love that reaches out beyond everything that exists. I want to turn you into living human beings, immortals.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Jesus Christus Erlöser (1971)

Love, People, School, Peace

“This idea of oh poor little black person, oh poor little poor person, oh poor little woman, oh poor little indigenous person, everybody's a poor little something!”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Interview to Vice. Meet Brazil's Donald Trump: He's Deliberately Outrageous and He Wants to Be President https://news.vice.com/article/meet-brazils-donald-trump-hes-deliberately-outrageous-and-he-wants-to-be-president. Vice (27 April 2016).

Idea, Personality

“No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing.”

Samuel Beckett book Imagination Dead Imagine

Imagination Dead Imagine (1965)

Life, Lie, Question

“I always feel that the young doctors are only too anxious to experiment. After they’ve whipped out all our teeth, and administered quantities of very peculiar glands, and removed bits of our insides, they then confess that nothing can be done for us. I really prefer the old-fashioned remedy of big black bottles of medicine. After all, one can always pour those down the sink.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

A Murder is Announced (1950)

Feeling, Fashion

“For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as “the shining world.” There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.
: E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Health, World, Star, Hell

“The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people—some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night. Then came the period when people we knew—not knew personally, but knew of—started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. “They gotta kill them,” she explained. “Otherwise it’ll never settle down.””

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

People, World, Nature, Personality

“The Republic of South Africa has a new formula under the National Party's leadership: black nations can get freedom without firing shots or revolution.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As prime minister, Graaff-Reinet, 26 May 1984, as cited in PW Botha in his own words, Pieter-Dirk Uys, 1987, p. 35

Freedom

“Fleecy locks and black complexion
Cannot forfeit nature's claim;
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: The Negro's Complaint (1788), Lines 13-16

Nature

“All the average feds care about is dressing up in black uniforms and having mustaches and starring at people… I know your mustache is cool! You got little gold-framed glasses! You scare me so bad! Ugh… you scum! Scum! … What's driving me crazy is that photo right there, zoom in on that, it's one of those cops with a black uniform with a mustache. You know that guy is a coward! You know he's a piece of garbage! You know he's weak! Oh! … Oh, you got a mustache, I'll just worship you. Oh, you got a mustache, it's okay! Ugh, your demonic little mustaches!”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Demonic Mustache Rant!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4ktiWWYxq8, February 2012. 2012

People, Guy, Photo, Star

“At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders—oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Grey King (1975), Chapter 10 “The Pleasant Lake” (p. 115)

Men, People, Religion, Light

“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door,
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 10.

Love, Flowers, Joy

“When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Rock My Soul (2003)

Life, People, Beauty

“My spirit is old; and some black lot awaits me
On my long road.
Some dream accurst, inveterate, suffocates me
Still with its load.
So young – yet hosts of dreadful thoughts appal me,
Sick and opprest.
Come! and from shadowy phantoms disenthral me,
Friend.”

Alexander Blok (1880–1921) poet

"My Spirit is Old" (1899); translation from Oliver Elton Verse from Pushkin and Others (London: E. Arnold, 1935) p. 175.

Dreams

“Though the ideas and opinions themselves are not necessarily illegitimate if held by non-black individuals, they, and the person enunciating them, are illegitimate if that person happens to be black. Thus, there's a subset of criticism that must of necessity be reserved for me, even if every non-black member of the court agrees with the idea or the opinion. You see, they are exempt from this kind of criticism, precisely because they are not black. As noted earlier, they are more often than not subjected to the whites-only sophisticated analysis.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Idea, Personality

“By the time they first encounter porn, most men have internalized the sexist ideology of our culture, and porn, rather than being an aberration, actually cements and consolidates their ideas about sexuality. And it does this in a way that gives them intense sexual pleasure. This framing of sexist ideology as sexy and hot gives porn a pass to deliver messages about women that in any other form would be seen as completely unacceptable. Imagine what would happen if suddenly we saw a slew of dramas and sitcoms on television where, say, blacks or Jews were repeatedly referred to in a racist or anti-Semitic way, where they got their hair pulled, faces slapped, and choked by white men pushing foreign objects into their mouths. My guess is that there would be an outcry and the images would not be defended on the grounds that they were just fantasy but rather would be seen for what they are: depictions of cruel acts that one group is perpetrating against another group. By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence.”

Gail Dines (1958) anti-pornography campaigner

Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality, Gail Dines

Women, Men, Pleasure, Sex

“At one time there was a black-out of any development of administrative law. The curtains were drawn across to prevent the light coming in. The remedy of certiorari was hedged about with all sorts of technical limitations. It did not give a remedy when inferior tribunals went wrong, but only when they went outside their jurisdiction altogether. The black-out started in 1841 with Reg. v. Bolton (1841) 1 Q. B. 66 and became darkest in 1922, Rex v. Nat Bell Liquors Ltd. [1922] 2 A. C. 128. It was not relieved until 1952, Rex v. Northumberland Compensation Appeal Tribunal, Ex parte Shaw [1952] 1 K. B. 338. Whilst the darkness still prevailed, we let in some light by means of a declaration. The most notable cases were Barnard v. National Dock Labour Board [1953] 2 Q. B. 18 and Anisminic Ltd. v. Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 A. C. 147. I sat in the preliminary hearings of both of them. We allowed each of those cases to go forward. It was because otherwise persons would be without a remedy for an injustice: see Barnard v. National Dock Labour Board [1953] 2 Q. B. 18, 43 and the Anisminic case [1969] 2 A. C. 147, 231B-C In effect it was only by leave that the action for a declaration was allowed to proceed.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

Judicial review.
Judgments

Law, Light, Time, Parting

“Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have.”

Octavia E. Butler book Kindred

Source: Kindred (1979), Chapter 5, “The Storm” section 13 (pp. 236-37).

Education

“What tongueless ghost of sin crept through my curtains?.
My family don't seem so familiar / And my enemies all know my name.
You better get on your knees and pray / Panic is on the way
My eyes are dead / My throat's like a black hole / And if there's a God / Would he give another chancer / An hour to sing for his soul?”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Gas Panic
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (2000)

God, Family, Way, Soul

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Tape 407, Conversation No. 407-18, 32:08 http://nixon.archives.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/tape407/407-018.mp3 On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence Over Abortion, Not Watergate http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24nixon.html by Charlie Savage, The New York Times, June 23 2009, retrieved June 23 2009 1970s, Tape transcripts (1973)

Time

“By the way, for the kids at home, Santa just is white, but this person is arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. Santa is what he is, and just so you know, we're just debating this because someone wrote about it, kids.”

Megyn Kelly (1970) American reporter

Way, Home, Personality

“Acapulco, Mexico: "…queer, dirty little dago town…. The people are too revolting for words, super dagoes & some of them are quite black as a result of Spaniards inter-breeding with the Indians; & of course they only speak Spanish"”

Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (1894–1972) king of the United Kingdom and its dominions in 1936

9 September 1920
Around the World with the Prince of Wales

People

“In August 2009, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer was discussing a tea party rally in Arizona, where it's legal to carry an unconcealed weapon. She said: "A man at a pro-health care rally… wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip… There are questions about whether this has racial overtones, I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns." All that her audience was shown were a rifle and pistol strapped to a man's back. MSNBC concealed the fact that the armed man was black and did not show the interview he gave to the reporter. Brewer knowingly deceived her audience because an armed black man didn't fit the racial narrative.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

"Leftist race-baiters stir up animosity" (9 May 2012)
2010s

People, Health, Color, Question

“Standing to America, bringing home
black gold, black ivory, black seed.”

Robert Hayden (1913–1980) American writer and academic

Middle Passage (lines 15-16), from Collected Poems (1985)

Home

“Take responsibility for your own happiness, rather than claiming telepathy you don’t have (unless you are telepathic) or ascribing to others ugly thoughts you can’t verify, and aiming endless, nonspecific blame for your mediocrity at the Trilateral Commission, “the media,” SKULL, the RAND Corporation, the long-disbanded Treemasons, the MAN, the Black Helicopter Legion, or the perennial favorite of paranoiacs, “Them.””

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 5 “Limited Series” (p. 151)

Happiness

“Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur… I shiver at the thought.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), pp. 225-226

Failure, Appearance

“Whether the color of your skin is black, white, yellow, brown or purple -- the extent of this tragedy is so incredibly devastating that we had to do something.”

Bert McCracken (1982) American musician

Statement about Hurricane Katrina on website of The Used, reported in L. Martinez (September 10, 2005) "Rockers plug in for Katrina", Ventura County Star, p. 1.

Color

“A gray eye is a sly eye,
And roguish is a brown one;
Turn full upon me thy eye,—
Ah, how its wavelets drown one!
A blue eye is a true eye;
Mysterious is a dark one,
Which flashes like a spark-sun!
A black eye is the best one.”

William R. Alger (1822–1905) American clergyman and poet

"Mirtsa Schaffy on Eyes", p. 228.
Poetry of the Orient, 1865 edition

Sun

“The question is — and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer — is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says "no". Well if that person — human life is not a person — then I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, "we're going to decide who are people and who are not people".”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

Life, People, Question, Personality

“Some say an army on horseback,
some say on foot, and some say ships
are the most beautiful things
on this black earth,
but I say
it is whatever you love.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Frag. 31
Translations, Sappho's Poems and Fragments (2002)

Love, Beauty

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York. He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on. My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years.
What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Conversation with secretary Rose Mary Woods on tapes recorded February-March 1973 http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/national/20101211_NIXON_AUDIO/3_VIETNAM.mp3 on tapes recorded February-March 1973; as quoted in "In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11nixon.html, by Adam Nagourney, New York Times (10 December 2010); with sound recording http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/national/20101211_NIXON_AUDIO/4_BLACKS.mp3. 1970s

Feeling, Thinking, Strong, Country

“New Labour, New Black Rod.”

Dennis Skinner (1932) British politician

A reference to Labour's election campaign slogan "New Labour, New Britain". http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1551880/General-Sir-Edward-Jones.html Daily Telgraph 1997 1990s

“I don't believe that [blacks in New Orleans immediately prior to Hurricane Katrina]couldn't afford a bus ticket out of New Orleans for a minute- they might not be able to drive out in a brand new Lincoln, but they could afford a bus ticket.”

Mike Rosen (1944) American political pundit

March 15, 2006 KOA radio

“When I had my own company on Traffic and Coonskin, all metaphors were able to get to the screen clearly. In Cool World, with the producer and Paramount watching me carefully to make sure I was in good taste, I instinctively poured stuff into the picture that I wanted to talk about. But when you force stuff, it's not really very clear. But, I have a great love for Max Fleischer, especially some of his Black & White Betty Boops with their strange Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong black folk tale jazz hipness that part of Cool World was a homage in style to those films and that style of cartooning. The Grim Reaper is right out of a Max Fleischer cartoon or old Terrytoons, which is why I hired and love Milton Knight the artist. He understands totally the Uncle Remus fable like qualities behind Fleischer and Terrytoons. Milton Knight is probably the purest artist of that style in the business. He has a hard time because studios think he is old fashioned…but that's the point.”

Ralph Bakshi (1938) Animator, filmmaker

[c. 17 September 2004, http://www.wild-things.com/bray/documents/ralphb.doc, Questions for Ralph Bakshi, DOC, Ralph Bakshi Forum, 2007-11-27]

Love, World, Fashion, Understanding

“With respect to my following, or, more accurately, being led by other members of the Court, that is silly, but expected since I couldn't possibly think for myself. And what else could possibly be the explanation when I fail to follow the jurisprudential, ideological and intellectual, if not anti-intellectual, prescription assigned to blacks. Since thinking beyond this prescription is presumptively beyond my abilities, obviously someone must be putting these strange ideas into my mind and my opinions.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Idea, Thinking

“Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Speech at Birmingham, Alabama, published in the Birmingham Post (27 October 1921) quoted in Political Power in Birmingham, 1871-1921 (1977) by Carl V. Harris (1977) University of Tennessee Press, ISBN 087049211X.
1920s

“The intensity of my feelings was reinforced by other events of the late '60s: the riots, the marches, the sense that something had to be done, done quickly to resolve the issue of race. In college there was an air of excitement, apprehension and anger. We started the Black Students Union. We protested. We worked in the Free Breakfast Program. We would walk out of school in the winter of 1969 in protest.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

School, Feeling, Sense, Winter

“Any attempt by political forces in the Third World to resolve the problems of their neo-colonial integration into the world trading system on the basis of national sovereignty is as naive as would be the attempt of black South Africans if they opted for a 'bantustan' solution to their particular politico-economic dilemma.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" (1988–9), in Fanged Noumena, p. 57

World, Problem

“[A] Juan Lopez from Oaxaca is freely accepted as a U. S. citizen in a way that a white Bob Jones would never fully be embraced as a citizen of Mexico, a country whose constitution still expressly sets out racially chauvinistic guidelines that govern immigration law. Someone who appears African or European would have a hard time fully integrating as a citizen in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese society, in a way not true of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese in America. The world assumes that in America a president, attorney general, secretary of state, or Supreme Court justice can be black; but it would be as surprised to find whites as high public officials in Zimbabwe as to find a black as prime minister or foreign minister in Sweden…”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, America: One Nation, Indivisible (2015)

World, Justice, Law, Way

“I understand that identity-politics arguments are supposed to trump everything else these days, but the idea that all Americans of Asian, black, and Hispanic heritage have homogeneous political interests and identities is both ridiculous and grotesque.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Say No to a Parliament of Tribes (2018)

Idea, Understanding

“I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 69

Life, Women, Men, Money

“Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight — a lunar eclipse, a new moon.
A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn't cold.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Bella Swan, p. 74
Twilight series, New Moon (2006)

“Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Space Cadet

Source: Space Cadet (1948), Chapter 10 “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?”, p. 126

Youth, Disease, Problem, Suffering

“If I were black and young, no steamer could revolve its wheels fast enough to convey me to the dark continent. I should go where my color was the correct thing, and leave these pale faces to work out their own destiny.”

Frances Willard (1839–1898) American suffragist

October 1890 interview "The Race Problem: Frances Willard on the Political Puzzle of the South", per 2015 book Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History https://books.google.ca/books?id=SKXjDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA200

Color

“I dated a guy who was half-black, but he dumped me because I'm such a loser. Wow, I shouldn't say things like that, I'm such a pessimist … he's actually half-white.”

Sarah Silverman (1970) American comedian and actress

Jesus Is Magic (2005)

Guy

“"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
"Often have I been to it,
"Even to its highest tower,
"From whence the world looks black.""Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
"A shadow, a phantom;
"Long have I pursued it,
"But never have I touched
"The hem of its garment."And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.”

Stephen Crane book The Black Riders and Other Lines

Source: The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895), XXVIII

Truth, World, Travel

“Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs.
One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

People, Thinking, Dance

“We had a conversation the other day with Ming the Merciless, one of the preeminent villains of modern times, whose half-century-long struggle with his opposite number, Flash Gordon, has helped generations of Americans conceptualize the fearsome enchantments of space. We caught up with the veteran malefactor at the Volney, where he greeted us in a turquise-and-gold dressing gown, a black skullcap setting off his striking yellowish pallor. We immediately put our foot in it by addressing him as ”Mr. Ming”
“I don’t want to be stuffy,” he said pleasantly, “but that’s Emperor Ming, if you don’t mind. …””

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“Ming”, p. 93, opening
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Time, Help

“Far transcend my weak invention.
’Tis a simple Christian child,
Missionary young and mild,
From her store of script’ral knowledge
(Bible-taught without a college)
Which by reading she could gather,
Teaches him to say Our Father
To the common Parent, who
Colour not respects nor hue.
White and Black in him have part,
Who looks not to the skin, but heart.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

“The Young Catechist” 1827.

Knowledge, Parent, Reading, Heart

“Replacing particles by strings is a naive-sounding step, from which many other things follow. In fact, replacing Feynman graphs by Riemann surfaces has numerous consequences: 1. It eliminates the infinities from the theory. …2. It greatly reduces the number of possible theories. …3. It gives the first hint that string theory will change our notions of spacetime. Just as in QCD, so also in gravity, many of the interesting questions cannot be answered in perturbation theory. In string theory, to understand the nature of the Big Bang, or the quantum fate of a black hole, or the nature of the vacuum state that determines the properties of the elementary particles, requires information beyond perturbation theory… Perturbation theory is not everything. It is just the way the [string] theory was discovered.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

"The Past and Future of String Theory" in The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's Contributions to Physics (2003) ed. G.W. Gibbons, E.P.S. Shellard & S.J. Rankin

Fate, Way, Understanding, Question

“Don't think for a moment that Mbeki is not anti-white - he is, most definitely. His speeches all have anti-white themes and he continues to convince everyone that there are two types of South African - the poor black and the rich white.”

Helen Suzman (1917–2009) South African politician

As quoted in "Democracy? It was better under apartheid, says Helen Suzman" https://web.archive.org/web/20120901223952/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1462042/Democracy-It-was-better-under-apartheid-says-Helen-Suzman.html (15 May 2004), by Jane Flanagan, The Telegraph 2000s

Thinking

“We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs…. The king’s ships were at sea.”

Winston S. Churchill book The World Crisis

The World Crisis, 1911–1914 : Chapter IX (The Crisis), Churchill, Butterworth (1923), pp. 212-213.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Way, Water, Speed, Sea

Quotes about blackness page 12

Quotes about blackness
page 12