Quotes About Struggle

As Ellison's black protagonist exclaimed in Invisible Man, You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them [whites] recognize you.30 This did not happen much in the 1940s, but it did in the 1960s, when advocates of black power pushed whites out of the civil rights movement.

Now I think I understand how this world can overcome a man.

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti.

Después de todo ¿dónde no hay infierno?

On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.

Does not people's preoccupation these days with drugs, alcohol, medication and self deception prove that the truth not only hurts, but it is torture to bear?

Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.

If textbooks recognized Lincoln's racism, students would learn that racism not only affects Ku Klux Klan extremists but has been normal throughout our history. And as they watched Lincoln struggle with himself to apply America's democratic principles across the color line, students would see how ideas can develop and a person can grow.

The Civil War had been about something other than states' rights after all. It began as a war to force or prevent the breakup of the United States.

The authors make no connection between the failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later. Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen.

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

The opposite of racism is antiracism, of course, or what we might call racial idealism or equalitarianism, and it is still not clear whether it will prevail. In this struggle, our history textbooks offer little help. Just as they underplay white racism, they also neglect racial idealism. In doing so, they deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the new fault lines that will spread out in the future from the great rift in our past.

Those few textbooks that do discuss Wilson's racism and other shortcomings have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public television documentaries, and historical novels.

As Ellis Cose famously raged: I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death. What more do they want? Why in God's name won't they accept me as a full human being?

The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class. —KWAME NKRUMAH

It's my firm conviction, now more than ever, that the degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free.

In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes.

I have torn myself out of many bitter places In America, that seemed Tall and green-rooted in mid-noon.

No one ever gave me an instruction manual on how to be an openly gay man.

He was a gay man who had to leave home to find himself, not a gay man who had found himself within his own home.

The Buddhists succumbed to the Muslims, the British brought in Christianity, and now the Muslims decide one faction of their religion is better than the other.

It is hard for one man to beat an army," Danil said. "But not impossible," Baradar answered.