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I was all at once very tired. I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people—people I would never understand. I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way wit
... See moreJames Baldwin • Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)
The negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or in death.
Alexis de Tocqueville • Democracy in America, Volume I and II (Optimized for Kindle)
I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.
James Baldwin • Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)
Bell was an open advocate of historical revisionism and is best known for his “interest convergence” thesis, described in his 1970 book, Race, Racism, and American Law.9 This thesis holds that whites have allowed rights to blacks only when it was in their interest to do so—a dismal view that denies the possibility that any moral progress had been m
... See moreHelen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
‘People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity… Straight cats invent faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves.’
James Baldwin • Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)
I think—I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly co
... See moreJames Baldwin • Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)
“The American people are infected with racism—that is the peril,” King concluded. “Paradoxically, they are also infected with democratic ideals—that is the hope.”
Taylor Branch • At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.... See more
James Clear • 3-2-1: How to time travel, the power of reading, and being grateful when you don't have what you want
‘Anyway,’ he said mildly, ‘I don’t see what you can do with little fish except eat them. What else are they good for?’ ‘In my country,’ I said, feeling a subtle war within me as I said it, ‘the little fish seem to have gotten together and are nibbling at the body of the whale.’ ‘That will not make them whales,’ said Giovanni. ‘The only result of al
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