Quotes about wall
page 16

“The legal system can force open doors, and sometimes-even knock down walls, but it cannot build bridges. That job belongs to you and me. The country can't do it. Afro and White, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, our fates are bound together. We can run from each other, but we cannot escape each other. We will only attain freedom if we learn to appreciate what is different, and muster the courage to discover what is fundamentally the same. America's diversity offers so much richness and opportunity. Take a chance, won't you? Knock down the fences, which divide. Tear apart the walls that imprison you. Reach out. Freedom lies just on the other side. We shall have liberty for all.”

Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court

Speech delivered on September 6, 1990, before the Annual Judicial Conference of the Second Circuit, quoted in Supreme Justice Speeches and Writings Thurgood Marshall. Edited by J. Clay Smith, Jr. (2002).

Courage, Chance, Fate, Freedom

“How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

1980s, Playboy interview (1985)

Sleep, Night, Beauty, People

“Also, I’m certainly not Trump’s number 1 fan, but even I can see that his plan isn’t just about the wall. It’s about tightening all border security. But also the wall. Because it’s a hell of a lot harder to scale a giant wall or fence than just walking across nothingness. Just ask Israel or Hungary. Sure, it doesn’t solve all the problems, but a giant blockade is a step in the right direction.”

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

Problem, Hell

“Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven. My life was without past or future; death, the pessimist would say, "a consummation devoutly to be wished."”

Helen Keller book Optimism

But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living. Night fled before the day of thought, and love and joy and hope came up in a passion of obedience to knowledge. Can anyone who has escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a pessimist?
Optimism (1903)

Soul, Death, Past, Future

“We got a real clear picture of what they all value. Every Republican's voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, 'unchain Wall Street.'”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

They're going to put y'all back in chains.
Campaign speech in Danville, Virginia, criticizing Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Republican speech, quoted in * 2012-08-14
VP Biden Says Republicans Are 'Going to Put Y'all Back in Chains'
Jake Tapper
ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/vp-biden-says-republicans-are-going-to-put-yall-back-in-chains/
2012

“We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Imagination, Future, Children, Truth

“To simplify somewhat, one may say that anthropology primarily offers two kinds of insight. First, its practitioners produce knowledge about the actual cultural variation in the world; studies may deal with, say, the role of caste and wealth in Indian village life, technology among highland people in New Guinea, religion in southern Africa, life on the Wall Street stock exchange, the political importance of kinship in the Middle East, or concepts about life and the cosmos in the Amazon basin. Although most anthropologists are specialists in one or two regions, it is necessary to be knowledgeable about global cultural variation, and about humanity as such, in order to be able to say anything interesting about one’s region, topic or people.
Second, anthropology offers methods and theoretical perspectives enabling the practitioner to explore, compare and understand these varied expressions of the human condition. In other words, the subject offers both things to think about and things to think with.
But anthropology is not just a toolbox; it is also a craft which teaches the novice how to obtain a certain kind of knowledge and what this knowledge might say something about.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 1 : Why Anthropology?

Study, Religion, Understanding, Wealth

“My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as the result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930. I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature. I told him I would like to make them [Mondrian's flat painting] oscillate, he objected. I went home and tried to paint abstractly - but in two weeks I was back again among plastic materials.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

1950s - 1960s, Excerpt, What Abstract Art Means to Me (1951)

Home, Painting, Art, Nature

“Congress... has become a secret tyrannical bastion of Wall Street, and that outrages people...”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

"How The Rats Reformed The Congress" (2018)

Secret, People

“In the wake of the pandemic we can be sure that fascists and reactionaries will seek to mobilize tropes of ⁠— racial, national, economic ⁠— purity, purification, parasitism, and pollution to impose their long-festering dreams on reality. The vengeful romance of the border, now more politicized than ever, will haunt all of us in the years to come. The “new” authoritarians, whether they emphasize the totalitarian state or the totalitarian market ⁠— or both ⁠— will insist that we all recognize we now live ⁠— have always lived ⁠— in a ruthless, competitive world and must take measures to wall ourselves in and cast out the undesirable.”

Max Haiven (1981)

No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation (March 23, 2020)

World, Reality, Dreams

“Shedding tears we spend the night in this deepening dark,
Our day is but a long struggle against an uphill path,
Not a single moment goes when we don't bewail our lot,
Lo! we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
We wish you well, O friends, leave you to His care,
And entrust our Qaiser Bagh to the blowing air,
While we give our tender heart to terror and despair.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I am betrayed by my friends, whom should I excuse?
Except God the gracious, I have no refuge,
I can't escape exile, under any excuse.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on the doors and wells,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I have been told this much too, ah! the scourage of time!
The servant calls his master 'mad,' a travesty of the mind.
As for me, I cannoy help, but rot in alien climes.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are gong afar!
This is the cause of my regret, to whom should I complain?
What wondrous goods of mine are subjected to disdain,
My exile has raised a storm in the whole domain.
Lo we cast a lingering look on the doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
You cannot help but suffer, O heart, the sharp strings of grief,
They didn't spare even the things essential for the mourning meets,
In the scorching summer heat, I've no cover or sheet.
Akhtar now departs from all his friends and mates,
There is little time or need to dwell upon my fate,
Save, O God, my countrymen from the dangers lying in wait!
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!”

Wajid Ali Shah (1822–1887) Nawab of Awadh

Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry, p. 63-67
Poetry

Despair, God, Time, Night

“The mobiles started when I went to see [[w:Piet Mondrian|Mondrian [in Paris, 1930]. I was impressed by several colored rectangles he had on the wall. Shortly after that I made some mobiles.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Question: How did the mobiles start?
1950s - 1960s, Excerpt, Interview with Alexander Calder (1962)

Color

“Any time I'm not playing, I watch the game at home on television. That way I can relax and if I decide to make a catch off my playroom wall, nobody is the wiser.”

Willie Mays (1931) Baseball player

Regarding his decision not to attend Game 1 of the 1960 World Series, despite having been in Pittsburgh the previous day for a TV appearance; as quoted in "Change of Pace" by Bill Nunn, Jr., in The Pittsburgh Courier (October 15, 1960), p. 25

Home, Time, Game, Way

“I say this about everything: when I was on Neighbours I said, 'These are the best years of my life!' When I was filming 'The Wolf of Wall Street,' I said, 'These are the best months of my life!'”

Margot Robbie (1990) Australian actress

I always think I'm having the best time ever, and that I'll never have so much fun again. Nojan Aminosharei, “There's something about Margot” https://www.elle.com.au/culture/theres-something-about-margot-7683, Elle, (Mar 25, 2014).

Wolf, Life

“They are hideous Golgothas, these old intermural cemeteries of ours. In other cities cemeteries are beautiful with all that the art of the gardener and sculptor can give....There the horror is masked. Here it glares at us with empty sockets. The tombs are fissured, or have caved in, or have crumbled down into shapeless bricks and mortar...[and] crawfish undermine the walls to feast upon what is hidden within.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Lafcadio Hearn, Creole Sketches, ed. Charles Woodward Hutsun (1880; Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1924), p. 136. Lafcadio Hearn referring to the cemeteries in New Orleans.

Beauty, Art

“I deplore racism and all the cruelty and strife it breeds. I am convinced the only long-term solution to every brand of ethnic animus is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ alone are the barriers and dividing walls between people groups broken down, the enmity abolished, and differing cultures and ethnic groups bound together in one new people... It is a startling irony that believers from different ethnic groups, now one in Christ, have chosen to divide over ethnicity. They have a true spiritual unity in Christ, which they seem to disdain in favor of fleshly factions.”

John F. MacArthur (1939) American pastor and author

"Social Injustice and the Gospel" https://www.gty.org/library/blog/B180813/social-injustice-and-the-gospel (13 August 2018), Grace to You 2010s

Christ, People

“After decades, with the people’s will the Berlin Wall fell. Hope for the day that all walls that separate the nations fall through people’s unity and determination.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Twitter Nov 10, 2019
2019

People, Hope

“I mean, with all this talk of building walls, and stuff like that, I think it’s worth remembering that if you look at the servicemen and the military in this country, a lot of them have names like Ramirez and Hernandez and Rodriguez. And just from my reading, it’s interesting that many of these men fight and die for their country – and women – and some of them don’t even get their citizenship until after they’re dead. So I think talk of walls and so forth is nonsensical.”

Mel Gibson (1956) American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter

Interview with Jorge Ramos on 2016 U.S. Presidential election https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b20BuX_Y-k/

Dead, Reading, Country, Thinking

“White walls! White walls! Torturous sprawls,
With ne'er a window space.
And so confined a quaking mind
Goes mad in such a place
The monotony so torturously
Cuts deep into the mind,
That men lose hope and just elope
With charge of any kind.”

Bobby Sands (1954–1981) Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army

Trilogy, pt.1
Poetry, Miscellaneous poems

Madness, Hope, Men

“Even though the gusts of zephyr
knock till eternity
on the red stone walls
behind the city of flowers,
no change will occur.
Only that they will tire themselves.”

Parveen Shakir (1952–1994) Pakistani writer and poet

Sessions of Sweet, Silent Thought: translated by Mahmudul Hasani, p.4
Poetry, The Surveillance

Flowers, Change

“When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahminism are encircled, undermined, and finally stormed by the soldiers of the Cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and complete.”

Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) Linguist and dictionary compiler

Modern India and the Indians, 1878. in Shourie, Arun (1994). Missionaries in India: Continuities, changes, dilemmas. New Delhi : Rupa & Co, 1994

Victory

“Ask a simple question, get a simple brick wall.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Chapter 3 (p. 44) Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

Question

“With infinite choice at our fingertips, we don't have to expose ourselves for an instant to anything that challenges our views if we don't want to. So the walls of the echo chambers grow stronger and stronger, until we only hear from the echo chamber next door when the shouty extremists are shouting, and their absurd views only make us more convinced of our own righteousness.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/extra-punctuation/14200-Hatred-And-Postal-Are-Deliberately-Offensive-So-Stop-Caring
Other Articles

Making love

“Mexico is paying for the wall.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2020s, 2020, October

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

“£60,000,000 I saw was being spaffed up the wall on some investigation into historic child abuse. What on earth is that going to do to protect the people now?”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Boris Johnson: Money Spent Investigating Historical Child Abuse Is "Spaffed Up The Wall" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_FSqfXyUFk, LBC, 14 March 2019 2010s, 2019

People

“Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph
The great American flag
Is wrapped and dragged with explosives
Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters
Barricaded blocks and borders
Look what you taught us
It's murder on my street, your street, back streets
Wall Street, corporate offices, banks
Employees and bosses with homicidal thoughts
Donald Trump's in office, we lost Barack
And promised to never doubt him again
But is America honest or do we bask in sin?
Pass the gin, I mix it with American blood
Then bash him in, you crippin' or you married to blood?
I'll ask again—oops—accident
It's nasty when you set us up
Then roll the dice, then bet us up
You overnight the big rifles, then tell Fox to be scared of us
Gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera
America’s a reflection of me
That's what a mirror does”

Kendrick Lamar (1987) American rapper, songwriter and record producer from California

Source: Song lyrics, DAMN. (2017), XXX

Daughters

“A few social media ideas for public servants looking to build an audience: - Endorse Single-Payer Medicare for All, - Hold Wall Street Accountable, - Make Min Wage = Living Wage, - Cancel Puerto Rican Debt, - End For-Profit Prisons & ICE Detention, - Fight for a #GreenNewDeal”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Twitter post, https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1080300714126200832 (1 January 2019) 2019, January 2019

Fight, Idea, Making love

“I have an interest in the outsider…In fiction you’re not often writing about the typical, you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour … another part comes from my personality: I’m an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.”

Celeste Ng (1980) American novelist

On her writing interests in “Celeste Ng: ‘It’s a novel about race, and class and privilege’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/04/celeste-ng-interview-little-fires-everywhere in The Guardian (2017 Nov 4)

Personality, Feeling, Parting

“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first — and all this for trifles that no man really needs!”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Speech, London (10 March 1880)

Tree, Hate, Love, Learning

“You can't give the average Wall Street CEO really lenient standards of accounting and expect the figures to be good. The accountant is like the referee in soccer. The accountant has to be the adult that prevents the mayhem. Accountants don't want to be the adults because it causes liability, it causes responsibility, it causes difficulty ... they failed us terribly.”

Charlie Munger (1924) American business magnate, lawyer, investor, and philanthropist

[A Conversation with Charlie Munger, Ross School of Business, YouTube, March 22, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pph3Bg8Pihg] (quote at 23:30 of 1:59:58)

“Political friendships are political business transactions and in political, as in economic life, business transactions are most easily and reliably concluded between strong parties The weakling always goes to the wall. A people that lacks a genuine sacrificial spirit or believes that it is not rich enough to keep its armaments in order thereby only betrays that it is played out. I beg you to bear one idea in mind through every difficulty. If anyone should threaten our homestead, we must be ready to the last man.”

Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (1856–1921) German chancellor during World War I

Speech to the Reichstag introducing the Military Bill (April 1913), quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany from Defeat to Conquest, 1913–1933 (1945), p. 28

Friendship, Business, Strong, Idea

“False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

Friendship, Support, Animals, Falseness

“If you're trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I've had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

“Changing the world for the better always comes with pain, with fatigue, with some heavy-hearted feeling of unfairness, with this unbreakable wall. But, as it turns out, there is always a flashlight that will sparkle at some point behind this dark spell, and you just walk towards this light hoping that you can peck a hole in that wall and squeeze your way through it.”

Chulpan Khamatova (1975) Russian actress

As quoted in "“Fostering Leadership”: online talk with Chulpan Khamatova" in Vladimir Potanin Foundation (7 August 2020) https://www.fondpotanin.ru/en/press/news/fostering-leadership-online-talk-with-chulpan-khamatova/

Pain, Light, World, Change

“Money is a kind of paintings, they can be framed, hung on the wall, and this will also be an exhibition.”

Viktor Pinchuk (1969)

Press interview quotes
Source: Yu. Lykova «Viktor Pinchuk: love of travel is innate» — Svejaya gazeta (Fresh newspaper): newspaper. — 1.11.2007. — № 44 (61)

Money, Painting

“Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same.”

Carlo Rovelli book The Order of Time

Source: The Order of Time (2018), p. 11

Home, World, Children

“Brexit means drifting apart but we don't want to build a wall.”

Donald Tusk (1957) Polish politician, current President of the European Council

Brexit means drifting apart but we don't want to build a wall - Tusk https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43314976 BBC News (7 March 2018)

“Time is still too complicated for us to comprehend and we cannot define it using our wristwatches, nor by using the big clocks on the wall.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Time

“It was the tip of the iceberg…There’s some unseen wall of faceless men that I have to climb over…as if on a mission.”

Kim Gordon (1953) American musician, bassist of Sonic Youth

On how her experiences with sexual harassment influenced the song “Hungry Baby” on her solo album No Home Record in “Kim Gordon: 'There's a wall of faceless men I have to climb over'” https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/04/kim-gordon-theres-a-wall-of-faceless-men-i-have-to-climb-over in The Guardian (4 Oct 2019)

Men

“And if my friends refused to listen to me, then the walls had to hear me or the stones in the fields and the trees of the forests.”

Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) German philosopher

Quoted by Harry Slochower in "Julius Bahnsen, Philosopher of Heroic Despair, 1830-1881" (1932), The Philosophical Review, 41(4), p. 371

Tree

“Of these houses
nothing is left
but a few scraps
of walls
Of so many
whose life I shared
not even that much
is left
But my heart carries
all their crosses
My heart's indeed
the most ravaged land.”

Giuseppe Ungaretti book San Martino del Carso

San Martino del Carso (27 August 1916). [A Major Selection of the Poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1997, ISBN 9781550960341]
Original: (it) Di queste case
non è rimasto
che qualche
brandello di muro
Di tanti
che mi corrispondevano
non è rimasto
neppure tanto
Ma nel cuore
nessuna croce manca
È il mio cuore
il paese più straziato.

Housing, Heart, Life

“Warriors do not win victories by beating their heads against walls, but by overtaking the walls. Warriors jump over walls; they don't demolish them.”

Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from "Tales of Power" (Chapter 10)

Victory

“The barbarians don’t come from outside the walls any more, do they?”

Michael Moorcock The Cornelius Quartet

The Cornelius Quartet, The English Assassin (1972)
Source: The Hill (p. 579)

“The call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain their ghastly vitality behind prison walls.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Four

Idea

“I suspect there was a power struggle in the Embassy, that some would have tried, out of habit, without rationale, to wall up information. They didn’t win.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 10 (p. 172)

“Paleoseismology... is science by backhoe. Researchers dig deep, straight-walled ditches and search up and down for signs of shaking.”

Shawna Vogel science writer

Naked Earth: the New Geophysics (1995)

Science, Search

“People marched and demonstrated, and the Berlin Wall fell, and communism was ended. People marched and demonstrated, and apartheid ended. And democracy and freedom were born. And now people are marching, and people are demonstrating, because people are saying no to war!”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Democracy, Freedom, War, People

“People predict by making up stories.
People predict very little and explain everything.
People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not.
People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough.
People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts.
The handwriting was on the wall. It was just the ink that was invisible.
People often work hard to obtain information they already have and avoid new knowledge.
Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe. In this match, surprises are expected.
Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable.
A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.
The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small.
So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

Amos Tversky (1937–1996) Israeli psychologist

Source: Notes made by Tversky for a scientific paper, c.1972. Michael Lewis. "The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World". Penguin, 2016 (ISBN 9780141983035).

Knowledge, Problem, Thinking, People

“I must get out on the trails once more that wind through shadowy haunts and cool,
Away from the presence of wall and door, and see myself in a crystal pool;
I must get out with the silent things, where neither laughter nor hate is heard,
Where malice never the humblest stings and no one is hurt by a spoken word.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: All That Matters (1922), p.11 - The Call, stanza 2.

Hurt, Hate, Laughter

“I believe that diversity should be a mutual gift, enriching interpersonal and social relationships, opening minds and hearts to those who are different. Yet if we place too much emphasis on what distinguishes us, then peculiarities and nationalisms inevitably resurface, with the consequence that differences become obstacles or, even worse, walls. A Christian, the word itself indicates, even before belonging to a nation, belongs to Christ, who gave his life for us.”

Luciano Suriani (1957) Vatican archbishop and diplomat

Source: Archbishop Luciano Suriani: History Calls Us To Overcome Divisions https://cordmagazine.com/interview/archbishop-luciano-suriani-history-calls-us-to-overcome-divisions/ (31 August 2020)

Heart, Christ, Life

“It hurts but I never show
This pain you'll never know
If only you could see just how lonely and how cold and frostbit I've become
My back's against the wall
When push come to shove I just stand up and scream: "Fuck 'em all!"”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Drop the World" (featured on Lil Wayne's Rebirth, 2009)
2000s

Hurt, Pain

“The Berlin wall can disappear when those conditions that created it fall away.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in The New York Times (16 June 1989) https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/16/world/a-gorbachev-hint-for-berlin-wall.html 1980s

“Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Land of slaves, land of masters,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, people, devoted to them.
Perhaps beyond the wall of the Caucasus,
I will hide from your pashas,
From their all-seeing eye,
From their all-hearing ears.”

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) Russian writer, poet and painter

—Published by Russky Arkhiv. Historical and literary collection (1890) Translation by Anatoly Liberman.
Original:
Прощай, немытая Россiя,
Страна рабовъ, страна господъ,
И вы, мундиры голубые,
И ты, имъ преданный народъ.
Быть можетъ, за стѣной Кавказа
Сокроюсь отъ твоихъ пашей,
Отъ ихъ всевидящаго глаза,
Отъ ихъ всеслышащихъ ушей.
Poems

People

“The Berlin Wall is perhaps the most visible expression of the moral gulf between free democracy and totalitarian dictatorship.”

Helmut Kohl (1930–2017) former chancellor of West Germany (1982-1990) and then the united Germany (1990-1998)

As quoted in "East, West Mark Berlin Wall in Conflicting Ways" https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/08/14/east-west-mark-berlin-wall-in-conflicting-ways/0ee15034-ea45-4c31-9490-7f64e7ac159b/ (August 14, 1986), The Washington Post

Democracy

“As long as there is a wall, barbed wire and orders to shoot, there can be no talk of normality in Germany.”

Helmut Kohl (1930–2017) former chancellor of West Germany (1982-1990) and then the united Germany (1990-1998)

“I light a candle for you
and pray for your return,
ask God to lead you back,
'cause I can't find the words
to break through your palace wall,
and make you clearly see
it's safe to take my hand and fall
with me in that great deep.”

Marian Renta

Music lyrics, Great Deep (2021) —"Great Deep"

God, Light

“Congress is a very special group of people. More than 80 percent of them [have] never left the United States. They live in their own walls. So I’m not amazed about this Russophobia which is being displayed by the Congress at the moment.”

Sergey Lavrov (1950) Russian politician and Foreign Minister

"Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov says 80% of U.S. lawmakers have never traveled abroad" https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/dec/17/sergey-lavrov/russian-foreign-minister-sergey-lavrov-says-80-us-/, Politfact, 17 December 2014

People