“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk- rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so- called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”
- Barack Obama
“His super-sized fondness for life, humans, activity, accomplishment, makes you aware of your own negative mind” and “his drive, his fame, the public nature of everything he does, makes you giddily grateful for the humble scale of your own life.”
- George Saunders
“I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim…There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”
- Bob Kerrey
“Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolution.”
- Jill Johnson
“Why not have a religion based on indulgence? Certainly, it is consistent with the nature of the beast. We are no longer supplicating weaklings trembling before an unmerciful ‘God’ who cares not whether we live or die. We are self-respecting, prideful people — we are Satanists!”
- Anton Szandor LaVey
“The best thing any of us can do to fight pollution is to adopt a vegetarian diet.”
- Pamela Anderson , 2006.
“The elimination of beef and other meat from the human diet is now required if we are to have any hope of saving the planet and ensuring our children’s future.”
- Jeremy Rifkin
“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re in the classroom.â€
- Donna Red Wing , 1995.
“Angie [Jolie] and I will consider tying the knot only when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able.”
- Brad Pitt
“The environmentalist’s dream is an egalitarian society based on: rejection of economic growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
- Aaron Wildavsky
