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"The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden--which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution."
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"A court that wouldn't just change the world. It would start the world over."

"Anon from the castle wallsThe crescent banner falls,And the crowd beholds instead,Like a portent in the sky,Iskander's banner fly,The Black Eagle with double head;And a shout ascends on high,For men's souls are tired of the Turks,And their wicked ways and works,That have made of Ak-HissarA city of the plague;And the loud, exultant cryThat echoes wide and farIs: "Long live Scanderbeg!"

"Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the callDon't stand in the doorwayDon't block up the hallFor he that gets hurtWill be he who has stalledThere's a battle outside ragin'.It'll soon shake your windowsAnd rattle your wallsFor the times they are a-changin'."

"LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the "revolution" actually comes about."

"I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'"

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

"The most important of all revolutions, a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions."

"I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success."

"We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution."
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"The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way."

"You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us."

"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."

"Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of."

"Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met."

"Beauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears."

"Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be de- struction."

"Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work-the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again- and because genies don't go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren't going to surrender. It's a war, but I don't believe we're losing it, even if we won't win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways."
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