“The Russians had done more than invade Czechoslovakia — they had sent their damn tanks crashing into our skulls, they had invaded the hopes of socialists all over the world.”
“The new consciousness born in these States can be traced back through old gnostic texts, visions, artists & shamans; it is the consciousness of our ground nature suppressed & desecrated.”
“We want government by the people, for the people, and of the people," said Fred Hampton. “Fuck this shit of government by the pigs for the pigs, and of the pigs. This town's hungry, and we need a barbecue.”
“Since the trial opened last Wednesday, lawyers and observers have been stunned by Judge Hoffman, by his overt hostility to the defendants, by his rejection of routine defense motions, and by his denial of fundamental constitutional rights.”
“Movement leaders no longer face minor penalties, misdemeanor charges, and a few worthy months in jail. Seale, said Kunstler, faces the very real likelihood of execution. 'The fun has gone out of our practice. We now face a deadening responsibility.' ”
“Since I was shot,” Warhol says, “everything is such a dream to me. I don’t know what anything is about. Like I don’t even know whether or not I’m really alive or — whether I died. It’s sad”
“The spirit of Gandhian agape that hung like a halo over Selma, with its nuns and angelic-faced students, was gone, replaced by a clenched militancy fueled by a despair expressed by Martin King's admission that his dream of Washington 1963 has turned into a nightmare.”
“Nabokov's reputation as a novelist, scholar, translator, and lepidopterist is unassailable, but not many people know that he was also a great teacher (on the other hand, those of us who took his courses in the early '50s didn't have the vaguest notion he'd written a single word of fiction)”
