First Words 11-12/02

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

"WHEN I LOOK at my job and the platforms that I stand on and the microphone that I get to speak into, I don’t see that as a responsibility so much as an opportunity to create change in an imperfect world. We all share that responsibility—I just have a good job for making some noise."
Ani DiFranco, musician, Sojourners magazine (May/June 2002)

"A BIG HURDLE that none of us is spared (whether we know it or not): how to keep going and going, doing and doing, learning and learning, without becoming so set in our ways that we lose sight of (or our taste for) the stray, the different, the unexpected."
William Carlos Williams, poet, quoted
in DoubleTake (Summer 2002)

"THE FACTS OF this world seen clearly are seen through tears."
Margaret Atwood, author,
Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written

"THE DIFFERENCE between communism and capitalism is that communism is man’s inhumanity to man, while capitalism is exactly the opposite."
Joke making the rounds in Budapest cafes, as quoted by George Lang, author, in Saveur (April 2002)

"TO BE WITHOUT some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, The Sun (August 2002)

IF IT WERE all so simple!
If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds,
and it were necessary only to separate them
from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil
cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, exiled Russian novelist,
quoted in Yes! (Winter 2002)

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print