Quotes from books I’m reading

“The images of a nation as it approached zero hour: the well-groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-breasted suits before the Senate committee; the confusion and dismay in the business office and the university; the fear in the country club; the angry men marching in the silent street; the scramble for the rotting garbage in the dump; the sweet milk trickling down the dusty road; the noose dangling over the barn door; the raw northwest wind blasting its way across Capitol plaza.”

From “The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

#Fascism #Inauguration

Democracy Dies As Awful Man No Longer Able To Freely Drive 18 Blocks In Manhattan | Defector It is not very difficult to learn true and useful things about the new congestion pricing toll system that New York City switched on last weekend, but it is much easier to learn untrue things about it...

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“These news outlets and the hideous news influencers mimicking them exist not so much to misinform people as to keep people who refuse to learn basic shit in their preferred state of furious unknowing-not just uninformed, but vigorously counter-informed and convinced that something both terrible and vague is being done to them.”

From “Democracy Dies As Awful Man No Longer Able To Freely Drive 18 Blocks In Manhattan” by David Roth (Defector, Jan. 7, 2025)

@davidjroth.bsky.social @defector.bsky.social
#CongestionPricing #urbanism #CarBrain

Of course I didn't. Not really. Not then. Let's not speak of such things, she said, and this became our agreement. New lovers are gf always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands. We rarely spoke about those who had abandoned us or those we had abandoned. They were all dead to us now.

From “The Biography of X” by Catherine Lacey

#BookSky #Quotes

“ But what does it matter? Even if Doctor Goebbels is deposed and Operation Dandelion is canceled? They will still exist, the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes if not in the Orient then somewhere else. On Mars and Venus. No wonder Mr. Tagomi could not go on, he thought. The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same... Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step. He thought, We can only hope. And try.”

From “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick

#BookSky #Quotes #Resist

“When you feel as if you're about to give in to the idea that outrageous inequality is somehow unavoidable, remember how it all begins: with babies born naked into a society that segregates those it will dress up in expensive outfits and the others, whom it condemns to hunger, exploitation and misery. Maintain your outrage but sensibly, tactically, so that when the time comes you can invest it in what needs to be done to make our world truly logical, natural and just.”

From “Talking to My Daughter About the Economy” by Yanis Varoufakis

I bought tickets for me and my son, who was already a die-hard MST3K fan at thirteen, just a year younger than I was when I saw Time of the Apes in 1989. The series had never been on TV during his lifetime, but he didn't care. When I told Hodgson about Dylan's abiding love for his creation, he wasn't surprised. "Kids like the show—and they don't have a problem with references they don't understand, because their life is like that. They're constantly being confronted with things they don't understand, but they start to find meaning in the words and the tone in which they're delivered. The way we move into the world is the same way. You kind of learn things by proxy."

From “Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture” by Ken Jennings @kenjennings.bsky.social

"I don't know anybody or anything. Please don't ever talk to me again. Tell everybody to stop talking to me."

From “Hocus Pocus” by Kurt Vonnegut

#Booksky #Quotes #KurtVonnegut

Ernst Kirchner: I'm glad, no proud that those brown shirts are burning my paintings. Max Klinger: What do you mean? Kirchner: Imagine how I would feel if monsters like that tolerated my work.

From “Erasure” by Percival Everett

#fascism #art

“Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that's what we get, over and over, and from it we don't get much of a picture of how change actually happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. "Unhappy the land that needs heroes" is a line of Bertolt Brecht's I've gone to dozens of times, but now I'm more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn't know it has lots and what they look like.”

From “Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters” by Rebecca Solnit

Can I please be added?

“Prisons were not institutionalized on such a massive scale by the people. Most people realize that crime is simply the result of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege, a reflection of the present state of property relations. There are no wealthy men on death row, and so few in the general prison population that we can discount them altogether. Imprisonment is an aspect of class struggle from the outset.”

From “Blood in my Eye” by George Jackson

#Booksky #Prison #Bookquotes #GerogeJackson

May I please be added?

May I please get added?

May I please get added?

May I please get added?

Can I get added please?

Can I get added?

Can I get added please?

Could you add me please?

Can I get added to your pack?

“I can feel the roots moving across the land, gouging new channels through our eager flesh, seeking blood. The flower will bloom, the fragrance will remind us of good times. We will go willingly with a smile on our lips and love in our hearts. We will go because we do not want to learn another way to live. We would rather die. Or, perhaps, a voice will come down from the moun-tain, a bush will burn, new tablets of stone will heave into view like spacecraft. We could turn it all around and kill the garden. We could share food with the hungry, shelter with the people freezing in the storm. Love with the people who are crying in the rain. Take power. The answers are as simple as the questions.”

From “Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America” by Charles Bowden

The Timelines of Our Lives The plot of America is beginning to look a lot like those time travel stories in which society is just one squashed butterfly away from fascism.

www.wired.com/story/timeli...

“We speak of the Before Times as if there was a single moment when we could have chosen not to disappear down the wrong trouser leg of history. In fact, it takes a lot more than a squashed butterfly, a stray bullet, or even a stolen election to make modern fascism happen. We cannot get to the After Times without acknowledging that, yes, mistakes have been made, that there is a sadistic kink in the arc of history, that the world has changed for the worse-and that that did not happen overnight. In fact, a great many people have been living through the Worst Timeline for many generations.”

From “The Timelines of our Lives” by Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social (WIRED Nov. 18, 2020)

“The images of a nation as it approached zero hour: the well-groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-breasted suits before the Senate committee; the confusion and dismay in the business office and the university; the fear in the country club; the angry men marching in the silent street; the scramble for the rotting garbage in the dump; the sweet milk trickling down the dusty road; the noose dangling over the barn door; the raw northwest wind blasting its way across Capitol plaza.”

From “The Crisis of the Old Order 1919-1933” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."

From “Mother Night” by Kurt Vonnegut

“Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don't see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It's so beautiful, the moon. They re so beautiful, the flowers. I pick flowers for my dead father when I'm sad. He watches Al Jazeera all day. I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan. I know I'm American because when I walk into a room something dies. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. One day, I'll write about the flowers like we own them.”

“Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” by Noor Hindi

“But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection. So says our Blake.”

From “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk

“It makes no more sense to privatize medical care the way we have than it does to privatize fire departments and allow them to sell variable degrees of coverage with co-payments and deduct-ibles. They probably wouldn't cover some cities at all-like, say, Baltimore. Why should my taxes pay for your fire? Corporations got to buy what once belonged to everyone and rent it back to us one patient at a time.”

From “The Heart of Caring” by Mark Vonnegut

go.bsky.app/fSTPRC #Baltimore starter pack #hon