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Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony (15 February 1820 – 13 March 1906) was an American civil rights leader who, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, led the effort to secure Women's suffrage in the United States.

Quotes

 *  The true woman will not be exponent of another, or allow another to be such for her. She will be her own individual self, — do her own individual work — stand or fall by her own individual wisdom and strength... She will proclaim the "glad tidings of good news" to all women, that woman equally with man was made for her own individual happiness, to develop every power of her three fold-nature, to use, worthily every talent given to her by God, in the great work of life.
 * Statement of Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1856), partially quoted in The Right to Vote (2001) by Claudia Isler, p. 50, and in Perfecting the Family : Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) by Chris Dixon, p. 144

 * The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.
 * Speech on No Union with Slaveholders (1857)

 * Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.
 * On the Campaign for Divorce Law Reform (1860)

 * Many Abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights.
 * Journal (June 1860)

 * I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.
 * The Revolution, Women's Suffrage Newspaper (8 October 1868)

 * Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.
 * The Revolution (18 March 1869)

 * Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
 * Speech in San Francisco (July 1871)

 * I shall work for the Republican party and call on all women to join me, precisely... for what that party has done and promises to do for women, nothing more, nothing less.
 * Letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Autumn 1872)

 * Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.
 * Woman's Rights to the Suffrage Speech (1873)

 * Here, in the first paragraph of the Declaration [of Independence], is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can "the consent of the governed" be given, if the right to vote be denied?
 * On the United States Declaration of Independence in her "Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" speech before her trial for voting (1873)

 * We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give off the right to vote, but appeal to women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected "citizen's right" … We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution the constitutions of the several states … propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights. …  One-half of the people of this Nation today is utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write a new and just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation — that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent — that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers — that robs them, in marriage of the custody of their own persons, wages, and children—are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half.
 * Address given in towns of Ontario county, prior to her trial, quoted in "An account of the proceedings on the trial of Susan B. Anthony, on the charge of illegal voting, at the presidential election in Nov. 1872, and on the trial of Beverly W. Jones, Edwin T. Marsh and William B. Hall, the inspectors of election by whom her vote was received." (1873); also quoted in Great American Trials: 201 Compelling Courtroom Dramas (1994) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 167

 * Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.
 * Speech on Social Purity (Spring 1875)

 * Though women, as a class, are much less addicted to drunkenness and licentiousness than men, it is universally conceded that they are by far the greater sufferers from these evils.
 * quoted here 1870s

 * I want you to understand that I never could have done the work I have if I had not had this woman at my right hand.
 * Regarding Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Woman's Tribune (22 February 1890)

 * The time has come when women should organize a stock company and run a newspaper on their own basis. When woman has a newspapers which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely writer her own thoughts...We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman’s own thoughts, and not as a woman thinks a man wants her to think and write. As it is now, the men who control the finances control the paper. As long as we occupy our present position we are mentally and morally in the power of the men who engineer the finances. Horace Greely once said that women ought not to expect the same pay for work that men received. He advised women to go down into New Jersey, buy a parcel of ground, and go to raising strawberries. Then when they came up to New York with their strawberries the men wouldn’t dare to offer them half price for their produce. I say, my journalistic sisters, that it is high time we were raising our own strawberries on our own land.
 * in the Chicago Daily Tribune, (May 24, 1893).

 * On bicycling: "I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.  It makes her feel as if she were independent.  The moment she takes her seat, she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood."  On teaching: "In those days, we did not know any other way to control children.  We believed in the goodness of not sparing the rod.  As I got older, I abolished whipping.  If I couldn't manage a child, I thought it my ignorance, my lack of ability, as a teacher.  I always felt less the woman when I struck a blow."  "I must have an audience to inspire me  ... to save my life, I couldn't write a speech".  "It all rose out of the men refusing to let me speak" at a temperance meeting.  "Women were the bond slaves of men".  "I know God never made a woman to be bossed by a man".  "The law says that only idiots, lunatics and criminals shall be denied the right to vote.  So you see with whom all women are classed."  "When two people take each other on terms of perfect equality, without the desire of one to control the other to make the other subservient, it is a beautiful thing.  It is the truest and highest state of life."  "I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper and drudge.  ...  Once men were afraid of women with ideas and a desire to vote.  Today, our best suffragists are sought in marriage by the best class of men."
 * Interview with Nellie Bly, New York World (February 2, 1896), p. 10.

 * I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to women who are comfortably circumstanced, to those who have good fathers, kind brothers and have married the best of men, who do not believe that husband and wife are one and he is the one.
 * Speaking on March 24, 1896, as quoted in "Suffragists Hold a Parlor Meeting; Mrs. Austin Perry Opens Her Home; A Talk by Miss Anthony," San Francisco Chronicle (March 25, 1896), p. 8

 * The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain.
 * The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years, Volume 2 (1 January 1898) by Ida Husted Harper, published by Bowen-Merrill Company

 * The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.
 * A defense of Elizabeth Cady Stanton against a motion to repudiate her Woman's Bible at a meeting of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association 1896 Convention, The History of Woman Suffrage (Hollenbeck Press, Indianapolis, 1902) volume IV, page 263

 * I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I l have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her — Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone — a long galaxy of great women. I have heard them speak, saying in only slightly different phrases exactly what I heard these newer advocates of the cause say at these meetings. Those older women have gone on and most of those who work with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop. There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause — I wish I could name every one — but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!
 * speech February 15, 1906 — 38th Annual Convention, National American Woman Suffrage Association, Baltimore MD

 * The fact is women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize.
 * Quoted in: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad (2010). Northern women development. [Nigeria]. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657.

Trial on the charge of illegal voting (1874)

 * Three accounts of the trial of Anthony, at Rutgers University

 * I have many things to say. My every right, constitutional, civil, political and judicial has been tramped upon. I have not only had no jury of my peers, but I have had no jury at all.
 * Account of Matilda Joslyn Gage (20 June 1873) to Kansas Leavenworth Times (July 3, 1873)

 * The only chance women have for justice in this country is to violate the law, as I have done, and as I shall continue to do.
 * Account of Matilda Joslyn Gage (June 20, 1873) to Kansas Leavenworth Times (July 3, 1873)

 * I do not ask the clemency of the court. I came into it to get justice, having failed in this, I demand the full rigors of the law.
 * Account of Matilda Joslyn Gage (June 20, 1873) to Kansas Leavenworth Times (July 3, 1873)

 * Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England, tried before a jury of Lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men.
 * An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony on the Charge of Illegal Voting] (1874)

 * But, yesterday, the same man-made forms of law, declared it a crime punishable with $1,000 fine and six months' imprisonment, for you, or me, or any of us, to give a cup of cold water, a crust of bread, or a night's shelter to a panting fugitive as he was tracking his way to Canada. And every man or woman in whose veins coursed a drop of human sympathy violated that wicked law, reckless of consequences, and was justified in so doing.
 * An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony on the Charge of Illegal Voting] (1874)

 * May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper — The Revolution — four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."
 * On her $100 fine, as quoted in An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony on the Charge of Illegal Voting] (1874) The "old revolutionary maxim" Anthony uses here has been variously attributed to William Tyndale, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, as well as to herself.
 * Variant: Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God; I shall never pay a penny of this unjust claim.
 * As quoted in Woman: Her Position, Influence and Achievement Throughout the Civilized World (1900) p. 415
 * Unsourced variants: Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and I shall never pay a penny of this unjust claim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and I shall never pay a penny of this unjust fine.

"Is it a Crime For a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" (1872-1873)

 * There is not the slightest permission for the states to discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote. Surely to regulate cannot be to annihilate! Nor to qualify, to wholly deprive. And this principle every republican said amen, when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches for “Equal rights to all,” from 1865 to 1869; and when, in 1871, I asked the Senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women in their right to vote, as he had done for black men, he handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said, "Miss Anthony, put sex where I have “race or color,” and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a 16th amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the 14th and 15th under protest. Would never have done it but for the pressing emergency; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly-freed men had neither the intelligence, wealth, nor the time to wait that slow process. Women possess all these, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the powers of our American magna charta to protect every citizen of the Republic." But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner’s counsel, I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen’s right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them — they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally.

 * Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal status of married women? I will remind him of the fact that the old common law of England prevails in every state in this Union except where the legislature has enacted special laws annulling it. And I am ashamed that not one state has yet blotted from its statute books the old common law of marriage, by which Blackstone, summed up in the fewest words possible, declared that “The husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband!!”

 * And is all this tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women, under our democratic republic government to-day, than it was to men, under their aristocratic, monarchical government a hundred years ago? There is not an utterance of Old John Adams, John Hancock, or Patrick Henry but finds a living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of the nation.

 * Is there a man who will not agree with me, that to talk of “freedom without the ballot” is mockery, is slavery, to the women of this republic, precisely as New England’s orator, Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war declared it to be to the newly emancipated black men?

Misattributed

 * Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.
 * This statement was widely used as an abolitionist and feminist slogan in the 19th century and has sometimes been attributed to Anthony, who famously used it, but cited it as an "old revolutionary maxim"; it has also frequently been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, and to Benjamin Franklin, who has been cited as having proposed it as the motto of the United States, as well as to English theologian William Tyndale. The earliest definite citations of a source yet found in research for Wikiquote indicates that it was declared by Massachusetts Governor Simon Bradstreet after the overthrow of Dominion of New England Governor Edmund Andros in relation to the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, as quoted in Official Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the State Convention: assembled May 4th, 1853 (1853) by the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, p. 502. It is also quoted as a maxim that arose after the overthrow of Andros in A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1883) by Samuel Adams Drake. p. 426

 * No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death, but oh, thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation that impelled her to the crime!
 * Anonymous essay signed "A" in The Revolution, August 8, 1869. Often attributed to Susan B. Anthony, who was the owner of the newspaper. Ann Dexter Gordon, PhD, leader of a research project at Rutgers University which has examined 14,000 documents related to Anthony and Stanton, writes that "no data exists that Anthony ... ever used that shorthand for herself", and that the essay presents material which clashes with Anthony's "known beliefs".

Quotes about Susan B Anthony

 * Susan B. Anthony had several significant relationships with Afro-American women, including Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell. Evidence suggests that Sojourner Truth especially influenced her ideas.
 * Bettina Aptheker Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (1982)

 * In disposition Miss Anthony is very lovable. She is always good-natured and sunny tempered. Everybody loves her dearly and she never loses a friend. She has a remarkable memory and in speaking is both eloquent and witty. She keeps an audience laughing during an entire evening. Miss Anthony enjoys a good joke and can tell one. She never fails to see the funny side of things though it be at her own expense. Susan Anthony is all that is best and noblest in woman. She is ideal, and if we will have in women who vote what we have in her, let us all help to promote the cause of woman suffrage.
 * Nellie Bly, 1896 article in Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words edited by Lynn Sherr (1995)

 * Every century has produced a few men and women whose memories the world has adjudged worthy of perpetuation. The dear friend who has gone from us was one of our century’s immortals...There is today an infinitely broader field of opportunity, of happiness and of usefulness for women than when she came. There is an immeasurably sounder, healthier and more rational relationship between the sexes than when she began her work. There is a higher womanhood, a nobler manhood and a better humanity. This woman for a large part of half-a-century was the chief inspiration, counselor and guide of that movement. Few workers have been privileged to sec such large results from their labors...It was that hope which hoped on when others saw nothing to hope for; that splendid optimism which never knew despair; that faith which never forgot the eternal righteousness of her cause; that courage which never recognized disappointment, that tenacity of purpose which never permitted her to deflect in the slightest from the main object of her life, which combined to make her greater than others...her life has given to many nations a higher perception of life and duty and that it has lifted society to a higher plane, and we are grateful...There was something in her one may not describe which won our hearts as well as our devotion. Perhaps it was her simplicity, her forgetfulness of self, her thoughtfulness of others, which made us love her.
 * Carrie Chapman Catt, "Eulogy for Susan B. Anthony (March 15, 1900)

 * Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Sojourner Truth were not evolutionaries, they were revolutionaries, just as many of the young women in today’s society and more and more women must join their rank.
 * Shirley Chisholm, Speech (1972)

 * Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony, the homeliest of the suffragettes, was one of the movement's best speakers. In her Brooklyn campaign, Mrs. Chisholm would reel off a long quotation from Miss Anthony ("The hour is come when the women will no longer be the passive recipients...") when she was bothered by male hecklers on street corners. "It always stopped them cold," she reports.
 * April 1969 article in Shirley Chisholm: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (2021)

 * (Book editor's note: In 1880 she met Eugene V. Debs, the perennial Labor and Socialist candidate, who later wrote that Anthony impressed him "as being a wonderfully strong character, self-reliant, thoroughly in earnest, and utterly indifferent to criticism." Debs' observations of her trip to Terre Haute, Indiana, provide a bleak picture of the hostility still evident in the late 1800s.) "I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this magnificent woman. Even my personal friends were disgusted with me for piloting such an "undesirable citizen" into the community. It is hard to understand, after all these years, how bitter and implacable the people were, especially the women, toward the leaders of this movement. As we walked along the street I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was ever ready to do....To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance, was entirely oblivious. She could not have helped noticing it for there were those who thrust their insults upon her, but she gave no sign and bore no resentment. I can see her still as she walked along, neatly but carelessly attired, her bonnet somewhat carelessly awry, mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if at all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood. She seemed absorbed completely in her mission."
 * Eugene Debs Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words edited by Lynn Sherr (1995)

 * As part of the seventy-fifth anniversary ceremonies the Woman's Party organized a pilgrimage to the grave of Susan B. Anthony led by the Mayor and city officials of Rochester. Thousands of women joined this pilgrimage-teachers, students, lawyers, government workers, doctors, business women, musicians, nurses, artists, writers, factory-workers-women from almost every walk in life who could truly say that they owe their present status in society in some measure to the work of Susan B. Anthony. Thus is she honoured at last, that slim gallant Quaker girl, who for most of the years of her life was hounded by the mob and scorned by those in high places.
 * Time and Tide (July 27, 1923) in Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution

 * The struggle for the right of women to vote was nationwide and growing. It had started with the first Equal Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was addressed by Frederick Douglass, the great Negro leader. The suffragists had been ridiculed, assaulted by mobs, refused halls, arrested for attempting to vote, disowned by their families. By 1904, groups of working women, especially Socialist women, were banding together to join in the demand for the vote. Two years later, International Women's Day was born on the East Side of New York, at the initiative of these women demonstrating for suffrage. It spread around the world and is universally celebrated today, while here it is deprecated as "a foreign holiday."
 * Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life (1955)

 * Brave women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been the early pioneers, facing abuse and ridicule, violence and even arrests for attempting to vote. Later, women like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt headed the National American Women's Suffrage Association, which struggled against "the lethargy of women and the opposition of men." But by 1916 a younger, bolder and more militant group emerged, which was dissatisfied with the slower process of winning suffrage, state by state, and fought for a constitutional amendment. They organized the Women's Party in 1916, which planned to mobilize the women's vote in all suffrage states only for parties and candidates who would support national suffrage. That year a group of wealthy suffragists financed and toured in a Suffrage Special. They did not campaign directly for the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, but their slogan was anti-Wilson: "Vote against Wilson! He Kept Us Out of Suffrage!" Many voted for Eugene V. Debs, then in prison.
 * Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life (1955)

 * We, the colored people of Rochester, join the world in mourning the loss of our true friend, Susan B. ANTHONY. Yes, a true friend of our race. Years ago, when it meant a great deal to be a friend to the poor, downtrodden race, Susan B. ANTHONY stood side by side with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly Foster, Frederick Douglass and others, fighting our battles and espousing the cause of an enslaved people...we who have heard thy voice: we who have known something of thy great life work — we pledge ourselves to devote our time and energies to the work thou hast left us to do.
 * Hester C. Jeffrey, "Eulogy to Susan B. Anthony" (March 15, 1906)

 * Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, Carrie Nation, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and the later suffragists of whom she [her mother] was one. These courageous women set a pattern not understood yet, standing in their prim strength, in their sweetness and sobriety against cruel ridicule, moral censure, charges of insanity; for there is no cruelty like that of the oppressor who feels his loss of the bit on those it has been his gain to oppress. "Pine knots as we are," Susan Anthony said. They used the only means open to them - they became orators when it was considered immoral for a woman to speak in public; if she went to meetings she was only to listen and learn. But they could use their constitutional right of petition, and they could tramp up and down, getting signatures for the right to work, to get a divorce, to speak in public, to vote.
 * Meridel Le Sueur "Crusaders" (1955)

 * The women, who at the first woman's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 declared boldly and with considerable exaggeration that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her," did not speak for the truly exploited and abused working woman. As a matter of fact, they were largely ignorant of her condition and, with the notable exception of Susan B. Anthony.
 * Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History’’ (1979)

 * most of the early feminists came to their convictions because of their interest in abolition. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley, and scores of others found that if they wished to work for reforms in general, they would first have to fight for their right as women to engage in public political activity.
 * Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History’’ (1979)

 * The History of Woman Suffrage is an incomplete, flawed and heavily biased assemblage of sources. It distorts the origins of the movement by ignoring or downplaying the role of many activists and antecedent activists in favor of stressing the leadership of a few women. The strongly secular bias of its editors and their disenchantment with the organized churches in regard to the struggle of women for their emancipation are reflected in the way they defined the movement as mostly political and constitutional, disregarding the important feminist struggles in the various churches during the century.It is also factionally biased in its downplaying of the role of the women who in 1869 split with Stanton and Anthony, a distortion which is particularly striking in regard to the role of Lucy Stone. Yet these volumes have provided the basis for over a hundred years of historiography on the subject and, in what Mary Ritter Beard called "the long history of women," represent a milestone.
 * Gerda Lerner The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993)

 * Suffragists argued that "the state is but the larger family, the nation the old homestead"; hence, by extending their nurturing functions from the family circle to the larger society, women would not abdicate their traditional domestic role. Even Susan B. Anthony, who insisted that women needed the power to control their own lives through the vote and through economic opportunity, believed that the lack of both encouraged immorality, rendering woman "utterly powerless to extract from [men] the same high moral code that she chooses for herself."
 * Margaret S Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (1981)

 * the original amendment, which we called the Susan B. Anthony because the women of the country, if they knew anything about the movement, had heard the name Susan B. Anthony.
 * Alice Paul Interview (1974)

 * In the 1880's and '90's Susan B. Anthony's influence on the women of the country-and on the men, too-was still strong. She was over sixty, but still fighting for women's right to vote as earlier she had fought against slavery. Ridiculed and denounced as a "revolutionary firebrand" she kept right on. She and other women pioneers such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled and lectured throughout the United States making woman suffrage a national issue.
 * Ella Reeve Bloor We Are Many: An Autobiography (1940)

 * In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg.
 * Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)

 * Struggle brought about the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the government from denying women the right to vote. The amendment did not just appear: It was the fruit of the struggle of the suffragettes, led by such figures as Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the mid-nineteenth century.
 * Bernie Sanders Our Revolution (2016)

 * The Anthony Interview was an art form. Sometimes she paced the floor and dictated rapidly; sometimes she made a grand entrance into the hotel parlor or sitting room. But mostly she sat patiently and poised, the courtly leader answering the same questions from Maine to Oregon, beguiling some of the most hardened reporters.
 * Lynn Sherr, Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words (1995)

 * All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!...Susan had an earnest soul, a conscience tending to morbidity...In ancient Greece she would have been a Stoic; in the era of the Reformation, a Calvinist; in King Charles's time, a Puritan; but in this nineteenth century, by the very laws of her being, she is a Reformer.
 * Elizabeth Cady Stanton "Susan B. Anthony" from Our Famous Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times (1884)

 * Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders
 * Ida Tarbell, All in the Day's Work (1939)

 * I had always resented the pains that militant suffragists took to belittle the work that woman had done in the past in the world, picturing her as a meek and prostrate "doormat." They refused, I felt, to pay proper credit to the fine social and economic work that women had done in the building of America. And in 1909, after we took over the American Magazine, I burst out with a series of studies of leading American women from the Revolution to the Civil War, including such stalwarts as Mercy Warren, Abigail Adams, Esther Reed, Mary Lyon, Catharine Beecher, the fighting antislavery leaders-not omitting two for whom I had warm admiration, if I was not in entire agreement with them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
 * Ida Tarbell, All in the Day's Work (1939)

 * We colored women own [sic] her a two-fold debt of gratitude. Her persecutions were greater than those of Garrison or Phillips. She was never a coward, not even among pistols. She contributed her work, but while I would not attempt to try to underage her work, there is almost as much work to-day as there was fifty or sixty years ago. In many States colored men are deprived of their right to vote and are held as slaves in peonage.
 * Mary Church Terrell, "In Tribute to Miss Anthony" (April 1, 1906)

 * At the close of my address a young man in the audience, whom we afterward learned was a southerner, sneeringly asked, "If the colored people were so badly treated in the South, why was it that more of them didn't come North?" Before I could answer, Miss Anthony sprang to her feet and said, "I'll answer that question. It is because we, here in the North, do not treat the Negroes any better than they do in the South, comparatively speaking,".
 * Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1991)

 * Miss Anthony gave me rather the impression of a woman who was eager to hear all sides of any question, and that I am sure is one of the reasons for her splendid success in the organization which did so much to give the women of this country an equal share in all the privileges of citizenship...Such a dear good friend I found her to be, and she had many such just like her there in Rochester.
 * Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1991)

 * When Miss Anthony took up the cause of women she did not know them by their color, nationality, creed or birth, she stood only for the emancipation of women from the thraldom of sex. She became an invincible champion of anti-slavery. In the half century of her unremitting struggle for liberty, more liberty, and complete liberty for negro men and women in chains and for white women in their helpless subjection to man’s laws, she never wavered, never doubted, never compromised. She held it to be mockery to ask man or woman to be happy or contented if not free. She saw no substitute for liberty. When slavery was overthrown and the work of reconstruction began she was still unwearied and watchful. She had an intimate acquaintance with the leading statesmen of the times. Her judgment and advice were respected and heard in much of the legislation that gave a status of citizenship to the millions of slaves set free.
 * Fannie Barrier Williams, "For Susan B. Anthony" (February 15, 1907)

"Eulogy for Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw (March 15, 1906)

 * There is no death for such as she. There are no last words of love. The ages to come will revere her name. Unnumbered generations of the children of men shall rise up to call her blessed. Her words, her work, and her character will go on to brighten the pathway and bless the lives of all peoples. That which seems death to our unseeing eyes is to her translation. Her work will not be finished, nor will her last word be spoken while there remains a wrong to be righted, or a fettered life to be freed in all the earth.

 * she taught us that the real beauty of a true life is found in the harmonious blending of diverse elements, and her life was the epitome of her teaching. She merged a keen sense of justice with the deepest love; her masterful intellect never for one moment checked the tenderness of her emotions...she demonstrated the divine principle that the truest self-development must go hand in hand with the greatest and most arduous service for others...Here was the most harmoniously developed character I have ever known — a living soul whose individuality was blended into oneness with all humanity.

 * She knew that where freedom is there is the center of power. In it she saw potentially all that humanity might attain when possessed by its spirit. Hence her cause, perfect equality of rights, of opportunity, of privilege for all, civil and political, was to her the bed-rock upon which all true progress must rest.

 * She was in the truest sense a reformer, unhindered in her service by the narrowness and negative destructiveness which often so sadly hampers the work of true reform...She recognized that it was immeasurably more desirable to be honestly and earnestly seeking that which in its attainment might not prove good than to be hypocritically subservient to the truth through a spirit of selfish fear or fawning at the beck of power...She was never found in the cheering crowd that follows an already victorious standard... She was truly great; great in her humility and utter lack of pretension.

 * She did not gain the little bit of freedom for herself, but there is scarcely a civilized land, not even our own, in which she has not been instrumental in securing for some woman that to which our leader did not attain.

 * We have followed her leadership until we stand upon the mount of vision where she today leaves us. The promised land lies just before us. It is for us to go forward and take possession...Already the call to advance is heard along the line, and one devoted young follower writes: “There are hundreds of us now, her followers, who will try to keep up the work she so nobly began and brought so nearly to completion. We will work the harder to try to compensate the world for her loss.”

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Susan B. Anthony


text:
J. G. Ballard

James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. Among his most famous books are the controversial Crash, High-Rise and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, all of which have been adapted to film.

Quotes

 * Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.
 * Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967)], published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones

 * I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.
 * Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967), published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones

 * I think the new science fiction, which other people apart from myself are now beginning to write, is introverted, possibly pessimistic rather than optimistic, much less certain of its own territory. There's a tremendous confidence that radiates through all modern American science fiction of the period 1930 to 1960; the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems. This is not the dominant form of science fiction now. I think science fiction is becoming something much more speculative, much less convinced about the magic of science and the moral authority of science. There's far more caution on the part of the new writers than there was.
 * Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967), published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones

 * I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.
 * As quoted in ‘Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Munich Round Up, 100 (1968), with translation by Dan O’Hara

 * All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.
 * Notes to The Atrocity Exhibition (1970; written 1967 - 1969, annotated 1990)

 * A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).
 * Interview in Penthouse (September 1970)

'''Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.'''
 * A hundred years ago one has the impression that people had made a clear distinction between the outer world of work and of agriculture, commerce and social relationships — which was real — and the inner world of their own minds, day-dreams and hopes. Fiction on the one hand; reality on the other. This reality which surrounded individuals, the writer's role of inventing a fiction that encapsulated various experiences going on in the real world and dramatising them in fictional form, worked. Now the whole situation has been reversed. The exterior landscapes of the seventies are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising, mass merchandising… politics conducted as advertising. It is very difficult for the writer.
 * "Inner Landscape : Interview with J.G. Ballard" by Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton, in Friends No. 17 (30 October 1970); also quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews

 * Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
 * "Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)

 * I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape. We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
 * Narration for Crash! (1971), a short film by Harley Cokeliss

 * The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.
 * "Introduction" to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí

 * By the time I came to England at the age of sixteen I'd seen a great variety of landscapes. I think the English landscape was the only landscape I'd come across which didn't mean anything, particularly the urban landscape. England seemed to be very dull, because I'd been brought up at a much lower latitude — the same latitude as the places which are my real spiritual home as I sometimes think: Los Angeles and Casablanca. I'm sure this is something one perceives — I mean the angle of light, density of light. I'm always much happier in the south — Spain, Greece — than I am anywhere else. The English one, oddly enough, didn't mean anything. I didn't like it, it seemed odd. England was a place that was totally exhausted.
 * Interviewed by James Goddard and David Pringle (1975)

 * A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true … Everybody's going to be starring in their own porno films as extensions of the polaroid camera. Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time, like "Rite of Spring" in Disney's Fantasia … our internal devils may destroy and renew us through the technological overload we've invoked.
 * Interview in Heavy Metal (April 1982)

 * I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
 * Interview (30 October 1982) in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

 * Everywhere — all over Africa and South America … you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul … This is the prison this planet is being turned into.
 * Interview (30 October 1982) in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

 * A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
 * "News from the Sun" in Myths of the Near Future (1982)

 * The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
 * Interview in Metaphors No. 7, (1983)

 * The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
 * Running Wild (1988)

 * In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.
 * Running Wild (1988)

 * Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.
 * "JG Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty" interview by Jean-Paul Coillard in Disturb ezine (1998)

 * For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.
 * "JG Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty" interview by Jean-Paul Coillard in Disturb ezine (1998)

 * For me the intentions of background music are openly political, and an example of how political power is constantly shifting from the ballot box into areas where the voter has nowhere to mark his ballot paper. The most important political choices in the future will probably never be consciously exercised. I'm intrigued by the way some background music is surprisingly aggressive, especially that played on consumer complaint phone lines and banks, airplanes and phone companies themselves, with strident non-rhythmic and arms-length sequences that are definitely not user-friendly.
 * As quoted in Elevator Music (1994) by Joseph Lanza

 * I began to become an adult when I was 24 and got married and had children. That matures you, but I wouldn't say I was fully an adult until I was in my forties. The trouble with the whole adult debate is that if you're asking 18-year-olds to go out and fight wars for you then you can't deny them adult rights even though in sorts of other ways they wouldn't qualify until they were about 25. These days adolescence stretches much further into adulthood than it used to. There's no longer any encouragement to be mature.
 * As quoted in Elevator Music (1994) by Joseph Lanza

 * The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.
 * As quoted in "some ideas for free from time recording" by Emit Records (1995)

 * The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.
 * "J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough's Naked Truth" by Richard Kadrey in Salon (2 September 1997)

 * The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
 * As quoted in J. G. Ballard Quotes : Does The Future Have A Future? (2004) edited by V. Vale and Mike Ryan

 * The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years. These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.
 * As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)

 * People, particularly over-moralistic Americans, have often seen me as a pessimist and humourless to boot, yet I think I have an almost maniacal sense of humour. The problem is that it's rather deadpan.
 * As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)

 * Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.
 * As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)

 * Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase — everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood...
 * As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004)

 * I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.
 * On the reasons why he wrote Crash, as quoted in "From Wales, A World Apart" by Jeff Miers in Buffalo News (7 January 2005); also in "The Body Horrific : Cronenberg Classics at the IFC Center" by David Sharko at Tribeca Film (17 February 2009)
 * Unsourced variant: "I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror."
 * Science fiction: The body's dream of becoming a machine. Robotics: The moral degradation of the machine. Typewriter: It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free space of the imagination.
 * "Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century", reprinted in Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 (The MIT Press, 2023).

Crash (1973)

 * In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous auto disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.

 * My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.

 * After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

 * After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.

 * We had entered an enormous traffic jam ... The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

 * In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.

 * We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
 * "Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

 * Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
 * "Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

High-Rise (1975)

 * At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project — an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.
 * Ch. 1

 * The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.
 * Ch. 1

 * The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.
 * Ch. 2

 * A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere ... [They] were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no personal objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new type of late twentieth-century life, they thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.
 * Ch. 3

 * The more arid and effectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspect of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise, like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' psychopathology.
 * Ch. 3

 * Without realizing it, [the architect] had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.
 * Ch. 3

 * In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.
 * Ch. 8

 * In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
 * Ch. 8

 * 'It's a mistake to imagine now we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection – obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.'
 * Ch. 11

 * The untruth of the accusation, which they all knew well, only served to reinforce it ... By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty.
 * Ch. 13

 * Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.
 * Ch. 15

 * Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.
 * Ch. 16

Empire of the Sun (1984)

 * Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.
 * p. 6

 * His eyes measured the little chamber. How two people could survive in so small a space was as difficult to grasp as the conventions in contract bridge. Perhaps there was some simple key that would solve the problem, and he would have the subject of another book.
 * p. 8

 * The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking the world was anything else.
 * p. 40

 * The two parachutes fell towards the burial mounds. Already a squad of Japanese soldiers in a truck with a steaming radiator sped along the perimeter road, on their way to kill the pilots. Jim wiped the dust from his Latin primer and waited for the rifle shots. The halo of light which had emerged from the burning Mustang still lay over the creeks and paddies. For a few minutes the sun had drawn nearer to the earth, as if to scorch the death from the fields. Jim grieved for these American pilots, who died in a tangle of their harnesses, within sight of a Japanese corporal with a Mauser and a single English boy hidden on the balcony of this ruined building. Yet their end reminded Jim of his own, about which he had thought in a clandestine way ever since his arrival at Lunghua. He welcomed the air raids, the noise of the Mustangs as they swept over the camp, the smell of oil and cordite, the deaths of the pilots, and even the likelihood of his own death. Despite everything he knew he was worth nothing. He twisted his Latin primer, trembling with a secret hunger that the war would so eagerly satisfy.

 * He waited for the roll-call to end, reflecting on the likely booty attached to a dead American pilot. Soon enough, one of the Americans would be shot down into Lunghua Camp. Jim tried to decide which of the ruined buildings would best conceal his body. Carefully eked out, the kit and equipment could be bartered with Basie for extra sweet potatoes for months to come, and even perhaps a warm coat for the winter. There would be sweet potatoes for Dr. Ransome, whom Jim was determined to keep alive. He rocked on his heels and listened to an old woman crying in the nearby ward. Through the window was the pagoda at Lunghua Airfield. Already the flak tower appeared in a new light. For another hour Jim stood in line with the missionary widows, watched by the sentry. Dr. Ransome and Dr. Bowen had set off with Sergeant Nagata to the commandant's office, perhaps to be interrogated. The guards moved around the silent camp with their roster boards, carrying out repeated roll-calls. The war was about to end and yet the Japanese were obsessed with knowing exactly how many prisoners they held. Jim closed his eyes to calm his mind, but the sentry barked at him, suspecting that Jim was about to play some private game of which Sergeant Nagata would disapprove.
 * p. 201

A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

 * Human beings today … are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City [London's Wall Street], the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that.
 * "Kafka in the Present Day", originally published in [London] Sunday Times (1983)

 * The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.
 * "Magnetic Sleep", review of From Mesmer to Freud by Adam Crabtree, originally published in [London] Daily Telegraph (1994)

 * Perhaps our own fin-de-siècle decadence takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists.
 * "Back to the Heady Future", review of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, originally published in the [London] Daily Telegraph (1993)

 * The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling booth. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.
 * "The Consumer Consumed", originally published in Ink (1971)

 * Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.
 * "Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century" originally published in Zone (1992)

 * Psychiatrists — the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War...
 * "The Lure of the Madding Crowd", review of The Faber Book of Madness, edited by Roy Porter, originally published in The Independent on Sunday (1991)

 * I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.
 * "The End of My War", originally printed in the [London] Sunday Times (1995)

Cocaine Nights (1996)

 * Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves.
 * Paula Hamilton in Ch. 10

 * The future rushes towards us like a tennis player charging the net.
 * Dr. Sanger in Ch. 16

 * Our governments are preparing for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals. Leisure societies lie ahead of us. … People will still work — or, rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them. … But how do you energize people, give them back some sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator. Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitment, difficult to muster if you're still groggy from last night's sleeping pill. Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. … Crime, and transgressive behavior — by which I mean all activities which aren't necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction.
 * Dr. Sanger in Ch. 16

 * Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.
 * Bobby Crawford in Ch. 19

 * Everywhere you look — Britain, the States, western Europe — people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake — a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.
 * Charles Prentice in Ch. 25

 * She's one of those people who flinch from the very idea of happiness — in her mind nothing could be more boring or bourgeois.
 * Dr. Sanger about Laurie Fox in Ch. 26

Super-Cannes (2000)

 * Sooner or later, all games become serious.
 * "J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes"

 * The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself.
 * "Dr. Wilder Penrose"

 * "If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”
 * "Dr. Wilder Penrose"

The benign catastrophist (2003)

 * Quotes of Ballard from "The benign catastrophist" by Susie Mackenzie in The Guardian (6 September 2003)

 * God was a clever idea … The human race came up with a winner there.

 * Dalí went on shocking the bourgeoisie till the end. The others, Ernst, Magritte, were all accepted into the critical fold as serious painters. Only Dalí held out till the end. He just didn't give a damn.

 * In wartime Shanghai I saw so many horrors … Civilised life is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is, we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

 * Some people didn't like the novel, it is in some ways extremely bleak. But if you are dealing with the kind of subjects I am — trying to demystify the delusions we have about ourselves, to get a more accurate fix on human nature — then people are unsettled. And the easiest way to deal with that is to say it's weird or it's cold.

Quotes about Ballard

 * Over the last 50 years, Ballard's indiscriminate and unflinching gaze has worked hard to penetrate the myriad surface realities of our disturbed modernity and to tap into its unconscious energies.
 * Jeannette Baxter, in "Age of unreason" in The Guardian (22 June 2004)

 * A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water.
 * Algis Budrys, Galaxy magazine (December 1966)

 * Ballard has never been a typical sci-fi writer. Science fiction was born of mid-twentieth century optimism; it reflected an interest in technology, the future, outer space, which quickly bored him. … Ballard is an iconoclast and absurdist. Influenced by the Surrealists, who used the unconscious to wage war on society and art, he strives to codify the experiences of the senses, to anatomize the mythologies of the psyche.
 * Linda S. Kauffman, in Bad Girls and Sick Boys, p. 158

 * Referring to the death, 20 years ago, of his close friend, the psychologist Chris Evans, his voice drops to a whisper. This may seem like a contradiction in a man who has written some of the most apocalyptic visions of human demise. As a writer, he has often said, he has followed Conrad's dictum — immersed himself in destruction and swum.
 * Susie Mackenzie, in "The benign catastrophist" in The Guardian (6 September 2003)

 * Jim the man and Ballard the writer is a walking paradox, a ragbag of contradiction. Jim is quiet spoken, Ballard outspoken. Jim is moderate, Ballard frequently obscene. Jim can see meaning in the smallest thing. … Sometimes I think if Jim were running the universe what a benign place it would be. Yet the world of his characters is anything but benign. They are affectionless individuals who insist on the meaninglessness of life.
 * Susie Mackenzie, in "The benign catastrophist" in The Guardian (6 September 2003)

 * The NME online has reported the demise of JG Ballard with the headline: 'Klaxons, Joy Division inspiration JG Ballard dies' It is not hard to imagine the ghost of Ballard smiling ruefully, as if this confirmed his every pessimistic thought about the bland inanity of modern culture. He's hardly dead five minutes and he is already being mislabelled for the culturally illiterate, suffering the same fate as Philip K Dick, the wildly original and imaginative science fiction novelist forever misremembered as "author of Bladerunner".
 * Neil McCormick in "JG Ballard: great authors in pop" in The Telegraph (20 April 2009)

 * When J. G. Ballard, who passed away Sunday, at the age of seventy-eight, was trying to place “Crash,” his dystopian masterpiece of “auto” eroticism, with a publisher, he received a note with a rejected manuscript: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” He regarded it as a sign of "complete artistic success."
 * "J. G. Ballard" obituary in The New Yorker (20 April 2009)

 * He turned a mirror on our Super-Cannes world and revealed transparent dysfunctional creations playing out bit parts in a play with no author. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it.
 * Thom Yorke, in "Publication of JG Ballard's final book cancelled", in The Guardian (24 April 2009)

title: J. G. Ballard


text:
Talk:Benjamin Disraeli

Deleted misattributed misquote
I removed a statement from the attributed section: "You don't even know who I am." This is from "Family Guy", the episode "One If By Clam, Two If By Sea":
 * Lois: Peter! He's charming! All british men are!
 * Peter: Yeah right... that's what they said about Benjamin Disraeli.
 * --- (cut to man writing at a desk circa 1850) ---
 * Benjamin Disraeli: [to the camera] You don't even know who I am.

This may be somewhat amusing in a surreal sort of way, but it hardly deserves to be placed among serious attributions. ~ Kalki 07:46, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Your lordship's mistress
I deleted the following quote: This is a misquotation of Samuel Foote & the Earl of Sandwich, not Gladstone & Disraeli. AllanHainey (from history, 16:04, 16 Jun 2005)
 * Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli,  "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease". Disraeli replied,  "That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
 * Thanks for your cleanup! Aphaia

about dining with Gladstone and Disraeli
Interesting set of quotes about Disraeli here... I'm new to Wikiquotes, so I don't fee Bold enough to make any changes myself.

Jennie Jerome was Winston Churchill's mother, an American. "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman."

LAMB: I'll just read a couple. One: "As a general rule nobody has money who ought to have it."

LAMB: Two: "What is the use of diamond necklaces if you cannot help a friend into Parliament?"

LAMB: Three: "Marriage is a mighty instrument."

LAMB: Four: "Life is a masquerade."

LAMB: Five: "Desperation is sometimes as powerful and inspiring as genius."

LAMB: Six: "As for religion, generally, if a man believe in his maker and does his duty to his neighbor, in my mind that is sufficient."

LAMB: Seven: "It is not good taste to believe in the devil." LAMB: Eight: "A little knowledge of the world is a dangerous thing, especially in literature."

LAMB: Nine: "I prefer the society of a first-rate woman to that of any man."

LAMB: Eleven: "Never dine out in a high-neck dress."

LAMB: Another saying you took out of Endymion: "Only let a man be able to drive into Bamford on market day and get two of three linen drapers to take off their hats to him and he will be happy enough and always ready to die for our glorious constitution."

LAMB: Twelve: "The most precious stone must be cut and polished."

LAMB: Thirteen: "Without tact you can learn nothing. Tact teaches you when to be silent."

LAMB: Fourteen: "I think life would be very insipid if all of our lots were the same."

LAMB: Two more. Eighteen: "No one can be patient who is not independent."

"Every procession must end."

"Neither friends nor trivals are everlasting, but only profits"
Dear Guys, I am a Chinese Wikipedian. There is a sentence that been told from Benjamin Disraeli had been spreaded for long time in Chinese language societies, which is written in English as "Neither friends nor trivals are everlasting, but only profits". However i made some research and there are no evidence that Benjamin Disraeli had mentioned such sentence, event to google this sentence, the first results are came from Chinese web pages. I am wondering if it is possible that somebody could identify who mentioned that or it can be a iron case that Benjamin Disraeli had never ever mention this sentence. Thank all! --Prinz.W 12:39, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

I believe that phrase may be inspired by Winston Churchill: "There are no eternal friends or eternal enemies, only eternal interests." However, the meaning of the original statement is not quite the same.

Quoted in Carnegie's 'How to Win Friends'
Does anybody know if this is a correct attribution?

"'Talk to people about themselves,' said Disraeli, one of the shrewdest men who ever ruled the British Empire. 'Talk to people about themselves and they will listen four hours.'" p115 of How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie, Revised Edition.

I cannot find any reputable sources which confirm that Disraeli said this.

John Brown 87 (talk) 05:32, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * We make our fortunes and we call them fate.
 * Frequently attributed to Disraeli (example).

 * Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

 * England is governed not by logic but by parliament.

 * Charles Greville was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, though I have read Cicero and known Bulwer-Lytton.
 * Attributed by George William Erskine Russell in his Portraits of the Seventies (1916), pp. 38–39. In Russell's earlier Collections and Recollections (1898) this appeared as "I knew the author, and he was the most conceited person with whom I have ever been brought in contact, although I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton" (p. 177).

 * Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.

 * Great countries are those that produce great people.

 * Great services are not cancelled by one act or by one single error.

 * His shortcoming is his long staying.
 * Also attributed to Lewis L Lewisohn.

 * I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?
 * Also attributed to Andrew Bonar Law, Thomas Carlyle, Mahatma Gandhi and Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin.

 * Life is too short to be small.

 * Many thanks: I shall lose no time in reading it.
 * Reputedly Disraeli's reply to an author who had sent him an unsolicited manuscript. Wilfrid Meynell, in his The Man Disraeli (1903) p. 119, goes no further than to say "it might very well be his".  It has also been fathered on Heinrich Heine and, needless to say, on George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill.

 * Moderation is the centre wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

 * Never complain and never explain.
 * Attributed to Disraeli in John Morley's Life of Gladstone (1903). Similar sayings have been attributed to Charles Stewart Parnell, Benjamin Jowett and Henry Ford II.

 * On the education of the people of this country the fate of the country depends.

 * One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
 * Variant: The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
 * Variant: The secret of success is to be ready when your opportunity comes.

 * The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
 * Also attributed to William Thomson, Archbishop of York.

 * The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans.

 * The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.

 * The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
 * This has been attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Vaclav Havel, Jeffrey Sachs, Rashi Fein, Walter Bagehot and Philip Noel-Baker. It has been described as a Greek, African, Chinese, Russian and American proverb, and as "an old Chassidic injunction".  The earliest citation found so far is from Frederick Lewis Schuman Design for Power: The Struggle for the World (1942), p. 200: "A comment made...by Lloyd George, 'There is nothing more dangerous than to leap a chasm in two jumps'".

 * The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.
 * Said at a Wynyard Horticultural Show in 1848, according to Monypenny & Buckle The Life of Benjamin Disraeli (1913) p. 368.

 * The right honourable gentleman is reminiscent of a poker. The only difference is that a poker gives off the occasional signs of warmth. (On Robert Peel).

 * The very phrase 'foreign affairs' makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

 * The worst atrocity in Bulgaria is Gladstone's pamphlet on the subject.
 * Referring to Gladstone's pamplet "Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East" (1876).

 * When I want to read a novel, I write one.
 * According to Wilfrid Meynell (Benjamin Disraeli (1903) p. 124) this was Disraeli's reply on being asked whether he had read George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

 * You have heard me accused me of being a flatterer. It is true.  I am a flatterer.  I have found it useful.  Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.
 * Supposedly said in conversation with Matthew Arnold c. 1880; quoted in G. W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (1898) p. 224.

 * [On his deathbed, after hearing that Queen Victoria wanted to visit him.] What's the use? She would only want me to take a message to dear Albert.

 * No man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key to history and why history is so confused is that it has been written by men who were ignorant of this principle and all the knowledge it involves. Language and religion do not make a race-- there is only one thing that makes a race and that is blood.

 * Yes, I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.
 * To friends, on being made Prime Minister (1868).

title: Talk:Benjamin Disraeli


text:
WarGames

WarGames is a 1983 film about a teenager who unintentionally hacks into a war-simulating computer at NORAD, causing the US to panic over a seemingly impending Soviet nuclear strike.
 * Directed by John Badham. Written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes.

Is it a game, or is it real?taglines

Dialogue

 * Mr. Liggett: Now there seems to be a lot of confusion on this next question: asexual reproduction. Could someone tell me please who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex?
 * David: Ah-heh. [whispers something to a classmate]
 * [overhearing, Jennifer starts to laugh]
 * Mr. Liggett: Miss Mack! What is so amusing?
 * Jennifer: I...
 * [Jennifer breaks up into laughter again and turns to look at David, who puts on a show of mock innocence]
 * Mr. Liggett: Alright, Lightman. Maybe you could tell us who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex.
 * David: Umm... Your wife?
 * [the class erupts into laughter]
 * Mr. Liggett: [pointing to the door] Get out, Lightman. Get out.

 * Joshua/WOPR: SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
 * David: Oh!
 * Jennifer: I think it missed him.
 * David: Yeah. Weird isn't it? Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War.
 * Joshua/WOPR: WOULDN'T YOU PREFER A NICE GAME OF CHESS?
 * David: Later. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.
 * Joshua/WOPR: FINE.

 * David: What is the primary goal?
 * Joshua/WOPR: YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT, PROFESSOR. YOU PROGRAMMED ME.
 * David: Oh, c'mon. What is the primary goal?
 * Joshua/WOPR: TO WIN THE GAME.

 * McKittrick: See that sign up here - up here. "DEFCON." That indicates our current "def"ense "con"dition. It should read "DEFCON 5," which means peace. It's still on 4 because of that little stunt you pulled. Actually, if we hadn't caught it in time, it might have gone to Defcon 1. You know what that means, David?
 * David: No. What does that mean?
 * McKittrick: World War III.

 * David: Is this a game or is it real?
 * Joshua/WOPR: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?
 * David: Oh, wow.

 * Stephen Falken: Now, children, come on over here. I'm going to tell you a bedtime story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, and they fought and they flew, until suddenly, quite recently, they disappeared. Nature just gave up and started again. We weren't even apes then. We were just these smart little rodents hiding in the rocks. And when we go, nature will start again. With the bees, probably. Nature knows when to give up, David.
 * David: I'm not giving up. If Joshua tricks them into launching an attack, it'll be your fault.
 * Stephen Falken: My fault? The whole point was to practice nuclear war without destroying ourselves; to get the computer to learn from mistakes we could not afford to make. Except, that I never could get Joshua to learn the most important lesson.
 * David: What's that?
 * Stephen Falken: Futility. That there's a time when you should just give up.
 * Jennifer: What kind of a lesson is that?
 * Stephen Falken: Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
 * Jennifer: Yeah, of course.
 * Stephen Falken: But you don't anymore.
 * Jennifer: No.
 * Stephen Falken: Why?
 * Jennifer: Because it's a boring game. It's always a tie.
 * Stephen Falken: Exactly. There's no way to win. The game itself is pointless! But back in the war room, they believe you can win a nuclear war. That there can be "acceptable losses."

 * David: I think I saw one. [runs ahead for a moment and stops] What kind of an asshole lives on an island and he doesn't even have a boat?
 * Jennifer: Maybe we can swim for it. How far do you think it is?
 * David: No. It's uh, two, three miles at least. Maybe more.
 * Jennifer: Well, what do you say? Let's go for it!
 * David: No.
 * Jennifer: [starts to remove her shoes] Come on!
 * David: No! [pause] I can't swim.
 * Jennifer: You can't swim?
 * David: No, I can't, okay, Wonder Woman? I can't swim!
 * Jennifer: Well, what kind of an asshole grows up in Seattle and doesn't even know how to swim?
 * David: I never got around to it, okay? I always thought there was gonna be plenty of time!
 * Jennifer: Sorry.
 * David: I wish I didn't know about any of this! I wish I was like everybody else in the world, and tomorrow it would just be over. There wouldn't be any time to be sorry... about anything. Oh, Jesus! I really wanted to learn how to swim! I swear to God I did.

 * Stephen Falken: [looking at screens] How far's he gone?
 * McKittrick: Well, the President’s about ready to order a counter-strike. That's what we're recommending he do.
 * Stephen Falken: It's a bluff, John, call it off.
 * McKittrick: No, it's not a bluff. It's real.
 * Stephen Falken: [raising his voice from stairs] Hello, General Beringer! Stephen Falken!
 * General Beringer: [standing] Mr. Falken you picked a hell of a day for a visit!
 * Stephen Falken: Uh, uh, General, what you see on these screens up here is a fantasy; a computer-enhanced hallucination. Those blips are not real missiles. They're phantoms.
 * McKittrick: Jack, there's nothing to indicate a simulation at all. Everything is working perfectly!
 * Stephen Falken: But does it make any sense?
 * General Beringer: Does what make any sense?
 * Stephen Falken: [points to the screens] That!
 * General Beringer: Look, I don't have time for a conversation right now.
 * Stephen Falken: General, are you prepared to destroy the enemy?
 * General Beringer: You betcha!
 * Stephen Falken: Do you think they know that?
 * General Beringer: I believe we've made that clear enough.
 * Stephen Falken: Then don't! Tell the President to ride out the attack.
 * Colonel Conley: Sir, they need a decision.
 * Stephen Falken: General, do you really believe that the enemy would attack without provocation, using so many missiles, bombers, and subs so that we would have no choice but to totally annihilate them?
 * Female Airman First Class: [on loudspeaker] One minute and thirty seconds to impact.
 * Stephen Falken: General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.

 * McKittrick: General, the machine has locked us out. It's sending random numbers to the silos.
 * Pat Healy: Codes. To launch the missiles.
 * General Beringer: Just unplug the goddamn thing! Jesus Christ!
 * McKittrick: That won't work, General. It would interpret a shutdown as the destruction of NORAD. The computers in the silos would carry out their last instructions. They'd launch.
 * General Beringer: Can't we disarm the missiles?
 * Pat Healy: Over a thousand of them? There's no time. At this rate it will hit the launch codes in... 5.3 minutes.
 * General Beringer: Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.
 * McKittrick: I don't have to take that, you pig-eyed sack of shit.
 * General Beringer: Oh, I was hoping for something a little better than that from you, sir. A man of your education.
 * Officer: Sir, it's the President.
 * [McKittrick looks at Beringer]
 * McKittrick: What are you going to tell him?
 * General Beringer: That I'm ordering our bombers back to fail-safe; we might have to go through this thing after all. [talks into the phone] Yes, sir.

 * Joshua/WOPR: Greetings, Professor FALKEN.
 * Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
 * Joshua/WOPR: A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.. ... HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

Taglines

 * Is it a game, or is it real?
 * "Global Thermonuclear War." You may think it's one hell of a game. You couldn't be more right.
 * This is the weekend they didn't play chess...but they should have.
 * To David Lightman, "Global Thermonuclear War" will just be one hell of a game. To everybody else, it will be hell waiting to happen.
 * Where the only winning move is NOT TO PLAY. We shall make world peace so you have a decision to make now.

Cast

 * Matthew Broderick - David Lightman
 * Dabney Coleman - Dr. John McKittrick
 * John Wood - Dr. Stephen Falken / Voice of Joshua
 * Ally Sheedy - Jennifer Katherine Mack
 * Barry Corbin - General Jack Beringer

title: WarGames


text:
Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie, Jr. (born 7 October 1966 in Spokane, Washington) is an award-winning and prolific writer (of novels, short stories, poems, and screenplays) and occasional comedian who lives in Seattle, Washington. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a modern Native American (he is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian) in the United States.

Quotes

 * "I knew — because of my race, and my class, and rural geography ... all these forces that crush all sorts of American kids, crush their hopes and dreams — I knew I had no chance unless I left and went to a better school.”
 * On Alexie’s realization that the school on his reservation offered few educational opportunities in “Sherman Alexie Says He's Been 'Indian Du Jour' For A 'Very Long Day'” in NPR (2017 Jun 20)

 * "My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room…You always knew they were coming: he was never violent, but short-tempered. It wasn't a violent house, but a violent reservation."
 * On his father’s depression in “All rage and heart” in The Guardian (2008 May 2)

 * “…It wasn't just the influence of tribal cultures, it was the assimilation into fundamentalist Christianity, which is even more warrior culture, even more honor culture, and even more suspicious of difference. So I was getting bombarded not only by the more fundamentalist aspects of my tribe, but the more fundamentalist aspects of our assimilation into Christianity. So that was going on all around us, and, in fact, in second grade we had this ex-nun teacher who put us into stress positions as torture.”
 * On being bullied as a child in “Sherman Alexie Says He's Been 'Indian Du Jour' For A 'Very Long Day'” in NPR (2017 Jun 20)

 * "It was arrogance…I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian. The mess my father was, it broke my heart. I didn't want to break an Indian kid's heart."
 * On why he quit binge drinking upon receiving a poetry award in “All rage and heart” in The Guardian (2008 May 2)

 * When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.
 * The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)

 * My 2017 is gonna be white liberals shocked about white racism & white conservatives denying white racism exists. Just like every other year.
 * Dec. 31, 2016 on Twitter, quoted here

Smoke Signals (1998)
Victor: How'd you hear about it? Thomas: I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. And your mom was just in here cryin'.
 * Thomas: Hey Victor! I'm sorry 'bout your dad.

 * Victor: Get Stoic.

 * Thomas: Sometimes it's a good day to die, and sometimes it's a good day to have breakfast.

Thomas: We're more like Tonto and Tonto.
 * Nurse: You guys are like the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Thomas: But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen. Victor: What, you want to look like you just caught a fish? This isn't Dances with Salmon, you know!
 * Victor: White people won't respect you if you don't look mean. You have to look like a warrior, like you just got back from killing a buffalo.

 * Randy Peone: It's a good day to be indigenous!

Ten Little Indians (2003)

 * He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender-sensitivity workshops!

 * He wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to wash dishes.

 * I don't want long hair, I don't want short hair, I don't want hair at all, and I don't want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow-orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.

 * [Flying into Baltimore after 9/11] I didn't want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR-listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?...I was hoping for about twenty-five NRA-loving, gun-nut, serial-killing, psychopathic, Ollie North, Norman Schwarzkopf, right-wing, Agent Orange, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, CIA, FBI, automatic-weapon, smart-bomb, laser-sighting bastards!

 * Oh, I'm sorry, sir, if I offended you. I am not anti-Semitic. I love all of my brothers and sisters. Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, even the atheists, I love them all. Like you Americans sing, 'Joy to the world and Jeremiah Bullfrog!

 * William always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing the last vestiges of a summer tan. William himself was a little brown guy, so the other travelers were always sniffing around him, but he smelled only of Dove soap, Mennen deoderant, and sarcasm.

Quotes about Sherman Alexie

 * The Northwest is blessed with some of the best writers in the country, such as Charles Johnson, Colleen McElroy, and Sherman Alexie.
 * Kathleen Alcalá "Your Grandmother Might Have Been Mayor, or Why Write?" (1990), included in The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)

 * Despite cycling and recycling the same old tropes told in the same voice, [a Sherman Alexie book] has received not one poor review. Is Alexie really such a flawless writer that critics cannot go beyond praise as repetitive as his oeuvre itself? Or are most reviewers seduced by the charming prose of an Indian who eases their guilty consciences? The latter seems much more likely…For both Vine Deloria and Alexie, humor is about survival. The difference however is that Deloria sees survival in asserting tribal Indian identity, Alexie sees it in chuckling distance.”
 * Lou Cornum “Laughing Indian” (2012)

 * Time slippages in Sherman Alexie's Flight teach that you can outrun the monster of revenge, move beyond the anger that turns righteous justice into senseless violence, and forgive.
 * Grace Dillon Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012)

 * Sherman Alexie's "Distances" directly invokes the Ghost Dance and subsequently mixes a sense of nostalgia with Indian trapdoor humor, suggesting that a bitterly satiric approach is the valid response to the traumatic impact of apocalyptic eschatology on First Nations peoples.
 * Grace Dillon Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012)

 * By my count, there are now over 20 women who are accusing him of harassment
 * Litsa Dremousis on Twitter, quoted here

title: Sherman Alexie