“We can’t look to the enemy to validate us. That’s not their job. That’s not what we do. They only validate us when we’re wrong. When we’re at our worse.” – Anthony Browder

“You can watch a documentary of someone’s entire life on their phone. We live in a world where, increasingly, nothing remains secret. And one of the signs of true wealth and power may end up being that privacy will become a commodity only for those who have the serious money to buy it. For everybody else, all the world really will be a stage, with all the people on it self-consciously playing their role.” -Chloe Combi [Source: National Geographic February 2018]

“The outstanding and most prominent of man’s beliefs are those which were forced upon him, or which he absorbed of his own volition, under highly emotionalized conditions, when his mind was receptive. Under such conditions, the evangelist can plant the idea of religion more deeply and permanently during an hour’s revival service than he could through years of training under ordinary conditions, when the mind was not in an emotionalized state.” -Napoleon Hill

“[America practices] socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

“The 1800s in America was a time when a few ruthless individuals gained most of the country’s wealth. Banker J.P. Morgan once refused a loan to the U.S. government because, he said, it lacked collateral. Cleveland’s John D. Rockefeller began his business career as an accountant, heading a firm that investigates the potential of oil investments. He told his own employees there was no future in oil, then wholeheartedly invested in the natural resource himself.” -From, “Indian Summer” By: Brian McDonald

“Ours is a society in which the actor is more important than the real-life hero the actor portrays.” -Randall Robinson

“As he ran my papers, I was reminded of the armed white men, dubbed ‘pattie rollers’ by African Americans, who were deployed throughout the South to patrol and prevent slave rebellions. These patrols, which white men in the South were required to serve in, operated exclusively at night, traveling on horseback from plantation to plantation, harassing black people, looking for contraband (weapons, liquor, books, etc.) that might indicate a plan to flee. Pattie rollers were instructed to lash viciously any enslaved African without a written pass. In North Carolina, a law ordered pattie rollers to whip on the spot any “loose, disorderly, or suspected person” found among enslaved Africans. It was from these pattie rollers, funded by local taxes, that many modern policing concepts were derived. For example, pattie rollers, like modern police, referred to patrollers’ designated areas of operation as ‘beats.’” -M.K. Asante

“Find out just what people will submit to and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” -Frederick Douglass

“The undisputed historical backdrop fro racial profiling is two hundred and forty years of chattel slavery, a hundred years of Jim Crow, and four-hundred-plus years of intergenerational wealth transfer during which most of the time black people not only owned little property but were property. In roughly fifty of the first seventy-two years of our country’s first century, the presidents of the United States themselves owned slaves. In the infamous Dred Scott case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a black man had no rights that a white man need respect, five of the justices were from slaveholding families.

This history may not seem long ago, but it has left its thumbprint on our unconscious mental processes.” -Lani Guinier