no. 686

That Christianity became an imperial religion is antithetical to everything Jesus lived and taught. The Empire was never a friend to Jesus, and Jesus was never a friend to the Empire. The Empire executed Jesus with its most public and brutal method in order to display its power and eliminate a threat, and when the Jesus movement would not die, the Empire eventually co-opted the movement for its own purposes. That is what empires do. - From “Refusing the Hand of the Empire” by Mark Davies

no. 685

Christianity in the United States continues in [the] long and tragic tradition of serving as the religion of the Empire. The way of Jesus has been mistaken for the American way; including adherence to its social, political, and economic systems. Through increasingly sophisticated and ever present forms of propaganda, a form of Christianity is used to bolster loyalty to and support for the Empire. Every cry that we are a Christian nation is an echo of the imperial voice that seeks to tame Jesus and use the power of the Jesus movement to consolidate power of the Empire through the alienation of the “other,” by highlighting that their way is not our way, that “they” are not us. - From “Refusing the Hand of the Empire”

no. 684

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt

no. 682

no. 683

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening." - Chico Mendes, Brazilian environmentalist and trade union leader (1944-1988), assassinated for trying to save the Amazon

no. 681

no. 680

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Upton Sinclair

no. 679

...we were all living inside an enormous novel, an electronic novel, governed by instantaneity. In many ways, time didn’t exist in the sixties, just a set of endlessly proliferating presents. Time returned in the seventies, but not a sense of the future."

J. G. Ballard

no. 678

“The dangerous allure of Twitter is the illusion we can fix the world just with words.” 

@Xeni

no. 677

 "In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

no. 676

"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."

Arthur Miller

no. 675

"You can put a baked potato in the cockpit of a 747; that don't make it a pilot."

A. R. Moxon talking about President Donald J. Trump on Twitter.

no. 674

"The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor."

Dorothy Day

no. 673

“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views.” 

Doctor Who


Yeah, I know he's a fictional character, but for all his impact on the world, he might as well be real

no. 672

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness."

Oscar Wilde. This is the full quote.

no. 671

"You can organize a book burning but we will always whisper them to each other, share them in the dark and let amazing art be the trees whose shade our children will use to write their own books that need to be burned."

@JurlinaAntonio

no. 670

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them." 

Maya Angelou

No. 669

"R(ight)W(ing) psychology is instinctively deferential to hierarchy. Kiss up & shit down."

David Roberts (@drvox) on Twitter

no. 668

“And it was a choice. Never pretend you were forced. There is no force great enough to compel someone to do such things. There was no ulterior motive, no greater good. You did it for a pat on the head and a chance to have even more power. What more could you want, Ilia? You held lives in the palm of your hand and destroyed them at a whim. What more could you ever want?” 
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
 “I don’t.” He shook his head. “But neither do you. That’s the worst part. You don’t even know what you wanted. You just killed and killed and killed. You were a force of evil and destruction without even having the decency to care why you did those things. The universe will be better off without you.” 
She screamed as his knife drove into her heart and twisted. With another scream, ripped deep from within her, she grabbed it and dragged it out. With only seconds remaining, she turned her face to the stone wall so that his face would not be the last thing she saw. 
Barnabas stood, looking down at her body. 
"It’s not enough, is it?" Shinigami asked. 
"It’s never enough", Barnabas told her. "I stopped believing in heaven and hell long ago—at least, as they’re spoken about in the religious texts. But I can see why the thought of them has endured. The idea that she could do so much wrong and just die, not living more than a moment of the terror and pain she inflicted, is an injustice I do not want to let go."

From The Vigilante Chronicles by Natalie Grey and Michael Anderle

no. 666

“Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.”

A. Philip Randolph, 1889-1979