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Government
Quotations
Sunbeams
September 2002To be revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only the glimmering hope of a world to win.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
September 2002
My feelings change like the changing seasons. The trees will be bare soon and the darkness will call to me again. Miklós Radnóti: “Sometimes a year looks back and howls, / then drops to its knees. / Autumn is too much for me.”
September 2002The Sun Interview
Outside Agitator
How Darryl Cherney Set Out To Save The Redwoods And Ended Up Suing The FBI (And Winning)
A radical is somebody who goes out to the furthest edge of the debate in order to gain leverage with which to move the larger body of thought. If an ant wants to move an elephant, he has to move as far out onto the seesaw as possible. Then, through the laws of physics, he can move the great weight. That’s what activists do, only in a more psychological fashion. You go as far out there as you can in order to move society. The problem is that, once you’re out there, you’re perceived as an extremist and society is unwilling to embrace you.
September 2002
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Art Earthquake
“My front tires are so worn I can see the steel belts,” Michelle told me on the phone. “They could blow out any minute. Will you come with me to Kingston to fix them?”
May 2002
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
April 2002
I’m a year older than President Bush. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t seem like much of a father figure to me. Or maybe he’s as much of a father figure as this foolish nation deserves. Nearly everyone is behind him now.
April 2002Sy Safransky’s Notebook
February 2002
I don’t have an American flag on my car or my front door. But I’m more of a patriot than Attorney General John Ashcroft, who studies the U.S. constitution as if it were a menu in a fashionable Washington, D.C., restaurant from which he’s free to pick and choose.
February 2002The Sun Interview
Amid Plenty
Anuradha Mittal On The True Cause Of World Hunger
The United Nations estimates that around 830 million people in the world do not have adequate access to food. Numbers, though, distance us from the real pain felt by the hungry. Hunger is a form of torture that takes away your ability to think, to perform normal physical actions, to be a rational human being. There are people in my own country, India, who for months have not had a full stomach, who have never had adequate nutrition. This sort of hunger causes some to resort to eating anything to numb the pain: cats, monkeys, even poisonous roots.
February 2002Quotations
Sunbeams
August 2001We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
March 2001
How I yearn to be a better man, though I know that’s just a different kind of greed.
March 2001
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