In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
-Tyler Durden
We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
-Tyler Durden
As black children went to school [during reconstruction], they were encouraged by teachers, black and white, to express themselves freely, sometimes in catechism style. The records of a school in Louisville, Kentucky:
TEACHER: Now children, you don’t think white people are any better than you because they have straight hair and white faces?
STUDENTS: No, sir.
TEACHER: No, they are no better, but they are different, they possess great power, they formed this great government, they control this vast country…. Now what makes them different from you?
STUDENTS: Money!
TEACHER: Yes, but what enabled them to obtain it? How did they get money?
STUDENTS: Got is off us, stole it off we all!
-A People’s History of the United States
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right…. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you maybe see a file of soldiers… marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
-Henry David Thoreau
(Makes me think of “Genesis is exactly backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created.“)
One fact disturbed: whites would run off to join Indian tribes, or would be captured in battle and brought up among the Indians, and when this happened the whites, given a chance to leave, chose to stay in the Indian culture. Indians, having the choice, almost never decided to join the whites.
-A People’s History of the United States
