Harriet Hanson was an eleven-year-old girl working in the mill. She later recalled:I worked in a lower room where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed. I had been an ard...
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.
There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.
The rural Vietnamese was not regarded simply as a pawn in a power struggle but as the active element in the thrust. He was the thrust.
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.
I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you w...
Capital punishment could not be justified in any society calling itself civilized.
The government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend everyone's equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when the government does not fulfill that oblig...
Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being d...
You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets?
From time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance. As early as 1663, indentured white servants and black slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia, formed a conspiracy to rebel and gain thei...
Being fired has some of the advantages of dying without its supreme disadvantages. People say extra-nice things about you, and you get to hear them.
I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if yo...
But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.
The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.
I never cared much for machinery. I could not see into their complications or feel interested in them. . . In sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to hear the unceasing c...
I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're d...
How can you have a war on terrorism while war itself is terrorism!