Michael E Winkler

“Coexistence on this tightly knit earth should be viewed as an existence not only without
wars… but also without [the government] telling us how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know, and what not to know.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“This is class warfare by elites on the working class, in which the elites try to hide the way they have benefited from skyrocketing inequality by portraying themselves as more virtuous than those on the other side of the tracks, and thus more worthy of their good fortune. Call it COVID Calvinism: you aren’t simply lucky that your job allowed you to stay home or could never possibly be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English; you are more virtuous, and therefore justified in perpetuating the yawning gulf between yourself and the workers. You then use allegations of racism or sexism or transphobia to hide the class divide from which you are benefiting. Woke politics, in other words, is a smokescreen that obscures the realities of class.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

“I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality.
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― Flannery O’Connor

“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise