Lee Durham > Lee's Quotes

“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices”
― George Orwell

“Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people’s lives.”
― Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

“The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions that preserve the integrity of American democracy. More often than not, we keep learning that white rage and white fear are dishonest impulses that lead us toward fascism. White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away.”
― Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

“White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly 'poor' choices of people of color hypervisible.”
― Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.”
― Aristotle

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion. Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

“Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

“Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.