O. Henry Quotes

FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements.

I think the very idea of the social contract is in disarray.

Certainly I think the state is more than willing to not only attempt to change the consciousness of people, but to employ violence in ways that make people quite fearful.

I think people now live in an age in which the only thing - they don't think about getting ahead. They think about surviving.

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.

The promises of higher education and previously enviable credentials have turned into the swindle of fulfillment.

Within neoliberal narratives, the message is clear: Buy/ sell/ or be punished.

Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.

At the same time, you see in those studies, you see the emergence of various movements among black youth that are really challenging the ideology of neoliberalism since the 1980s.

Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.

Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.

We need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and a site for repression, which destroys thinking and leads to violence.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability.

Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims.

Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

The domestic war against "terrorists" [code for young protesters] provides new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations who are becoming more a part of our domestic lives.

The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers.

Very little appears to escape the infantilizing and moral vacuity of the market.

The architecture of war and violence is now matched by a barrage of goods parading as fashion.

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the "Overseas Contingency Operation," has morphed into war on democracy.

As modern society is formed against the backdrop of a permanent war zone, a carceral state and hyper-militarism, the social stature of the military and soldiers has risen.

War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

Everyone is now a potential terrorist.

As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

Young people refuse to be defined exclusively as consumers rather than as workers, and they reject the notion that the only interests that matter are monetary.

Today, there is a new focus on public values, the need for broad-based movements for solidarity, and alternative conceptions of politics, democracy and justice.

In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.

Education must become central to any viable notion of politics willing to imagine a life and future outside of casino capitalism.

Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

Young black men are considered dangerous, expendable, threatening and part of a culture of criminality.

Young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviors that can only be termed as trivial.

Providing reserves and exchanges for the whole world is too much for one country and one currency to bear.

On the one hand, there is no reason that a black person needs to live a portion of his or her life being concerned about the people of color around him. On the other hand, if you don't you're crazy.

Everybody needs history but the people who need it most are poor folks - people without resources or options.

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.

Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of diluting the milk supply with water.

For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.

Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy.

In order that one industry might grow or come into existence, a hundred other industries would have to shrink.

Everywhere the means is erected into the end, and the end itself is forgotten.

A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much.

If there is to be no loss whatever of dignity or self-respect in getting and staying on relief, then there can be no gain in dignity or self-respect in makings some sacrifices to keep off.

Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.

I think control is the wrong word. I would put it this way. You see a lovely girl across a crowded room and you walk toward her with hope in your mind. That's the way [my] pictures are made.

The intensely felt subjective image is always the reason for making a first rate picture.