The Reality

The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures. But as a Democrat, that’s what you do.

- Dorothy Day

We’re registering people to vote. No I’m not from Mississippi. State’s rights? – I see your point.

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place … if the majority does not include several votes from the political party that lost the last elections, that is.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies. Very powerful enemies who have purchased slaves, today known as “United States Senators” and these men don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do. Like “change”, for instance. They do what their masters tell them. Like good slaves.

- Robert F. Kennedy

When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them. Provided, of course that the state you live in will allow it, and if a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate agrees with you having those rights, and if the corporations that employ you or provide vital services to you which you depend on for life also think that you should have those rights, then, yes, sure, you can have them.”

- Helen Keller, 1940

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our efforts to guarantee a freedom and equality to all our citizens… And when I say all Americans–I mean all Americans. Today I recommend, humbly, to Congress this ten-point program which you need not overly concern yourself with, which includes provisions for an anti-lynching law, an anti-poll tax law, a Commission on Civil Rights, home rule for the District of Columbia, but take it or leave it. And furthermore, I have instructed the Secretary of Defense to take steps to have the remaining instances of discrimination in the armed services eliminated as rapidly as conveniently possible depending on the mood of the racists following completion of a 5 year trigger with milestones measured by reports that display a gradual decrease in lynchings, burnings, and beheadings of enlisted Negoes. We cannot let perfect be the enemy of good.

- President Harry Truman, 1948

I started with this idea in my head, There’s two things I’ve got a right to, and these are, Death or Liberty — one or the other I mean to have. That idea however ran up against some opposition from conservatives who insisted I have only Death, and so, because I’d rather not appear too disagreeable, I let them slowly kill me as a compromise.

- Harriet Tubman, 1901

I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please and they say in response to me, ‘Because’ which is valid, so, okay.

- Chief Joseph Hinmton Yalektit