Tears of the Silenced

by Misty Griffin

Courage isn’t having the strength to go on—it is going on when you don’t have strength. —Napoleon

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. —Barack Obama

No matter how bad home was, it was still home, and home is something that will always be a part of you, something that helps define your life. Whether or not you chose to repeat what you had learned at home in your life—whether you did better or worse—home would always be there with you.

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956