CLASS WARFARE

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley . At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her. That is class warfare. Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top 1 percent is not.

-- Al Franken

COMPASSION

True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.

-- Pema Chodron

CONSENSUS

Consensus is the folly of control freaks. It is not effective nor expressive. In ACT-UP, if I wanted to do something and you did not want to do it, I would find other people who wanted to do it and you would go do something else. Doesn’t that make sense? Collaboration only works between people with similar goals and desires.

-- Sarah Schulman