Douglass; Jefferson; Tommaso Campanella; Stegner

When I get discouraged in my quest for Justice, I recall these words:

FREDERICK DOUGLASS - AUGUST 4, 1857

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.

This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out 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.

THOMAS JEFFERSON - 1821

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

THE PEOPLE - TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568-1639)

The People is a beast of muddy brain,
That knows not its own force, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein.

One kick would be enough to break the chain;
But the beast fears, and what the child demands,
It does, nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.

Most wonderful! with its own hand it ties
And gags itself---gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.

Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not, and if one arise
To tell the truth, it kills him unforgiven.

WALLACE STEGNER - 1940

The initial mistake, the fatal step that leads to ever more fatal steps the means which inevitably corrupts the end, is to start considering men not as complex individuals, as little worlds each compact of love and honor and ambition and cheating and foolishness and cowardice and courage, but as units in a gigantic logistics problems, as ciphers from which large and meaningful statistics can be made.