Race And Racism Quotes

Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city's flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes. ~ Charlie LeDuff

It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do. ~ Brian Spellman

It's different when people who've been living under somebody's boot hate the foot the boot's on. An oppressed people can't be racist. They can be bigots, but not racist. You have to have power to be a racist... ~ Susan Fanetti

So what do you do if you are imprisoned for your race and ethnicity? The message is, Those are your crimes. ~ Sun Yung Shin

When it comes to race ain't nobody 100% anything, except human. So, be happy and proud to be human and alive to say it. ~ Sotero M Lopez II

A thousand ways every day, the white man is telling you "You can't live here, you can't enter here, you can't eat here, drink here, walk here, work here, you can't ride here, you can't play here, you can't study here." Haven't we seen enough to see that he has no plan to *unite* with you? ~ Malcolm X

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose. ~ Aberjhani

Does anyone in this room have it?"
"No, Chris, no one here has it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain."
I didn't have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God ... ~ Chris Crutcher

But if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall. ~ James Weldon Johnson

I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it. ~ Toni Morrison

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be reset. ~ Douglas A. Blackmon

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries - at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can't begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren't. ~ Octavia E. Butler

Every addict takes junk to escape something, the Muslim explains. He explains that most black junkies really are trying to narcotize themselves against being a black man in the white man's America. But, actually, the Muslim says, the black man taking dope is only helping the white man to "prove" that the black man is nothing. ~ Malcolm X

My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Only God can break through the variegated walls of skin to capture the one and only hue of the heart. One Blood. ~ Katelyne Parker

As a country, we are in a state of denial about issues of race and racism. And too many of our leaders have concluded that the way to remedy racism is to simply stop talking about race. ~ Lani Guinier

Pride is the problem. Everyone wants to be right so badly they overlook the "rights" of others. ~ Carlos Wallace

our democracy is controlled by a wealthy elite. Politicians who work for the wealthy need the police to protect them from the people. And so the whole chain of command protects the killer cop. The ruling class give carte blanche to law enforcement, who in turn press down on those most stranded by the neoliberal state, the poor-- and more so, the Black poor."
-- Nicolas Powers ~ Maya Schenwar

Moreover, in removing race and racism from the discussion altogether, we're paving the way for us as one race to call racism what it actually is: sin borne in a heart of pride and prejudice. ~ David Platt

Calling for an end to hate shouldn't be treated as a punishable offense. ~ DaShanne Stokes

I don't know which hurt more: his rejection, his punch, or my own elder siblings laughing at my pain. ~ Dorothy Hampton Marcus

Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Issues can only be resolved if each person accepts accountability in the problem. ~ Carlos Wallace

Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it must somehow be your fault. Trayvon Martin's hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis's loud music did the same. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But I now believe that we will probably go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time where Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our pleasure. ~ Jonathan Kozol

It's no disgrace to be black, but it's often very inconvenient. ~ James Weldon Johnson

I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us - Christians, Muslims, atheists - lived in this fear of this truth. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

He was not safe. I wasn't angry, I was heartbroken.

We couldn't talk about the ways in which race and racism impacted my life, because he was unwilling to even acknowledge the racism that was impacting my life and he was unable to prioritize my safety over his comfort - which meant that we couldn't talk about me. ~ Ijeoma Oluo

Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are - and I say this with big pride - the progeny of slaves. If there's any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we've traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby's, and much of black America's, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. ~ Toni Morrison

But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites. ~ Junius Williams

Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again. ~ DaShanne Stokes

It is particularly important for white Americans to approach this subject matter with the right goals in mind. Our goal must be sight, transformation, renewed consciousness. ~ Daniel Hill

We all must abide by the rules, but some of us must follow more than others...Like Sweet Potato and her twisted leg, we have been born with a defect--the defect of not being white. Only, unlike Sweet Potato's case, there is no correcting it. There is only correcting the vision of those who view it as a defect, though not even a war and Reconstruction have been able to do that. ~ Stacey Lee, The Downstairs Girl

Racism is pure ignorance. We are part of the same race. The human race ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods. ~ Barbara Neely

At Snortin' Reformatory, a notorious Washington, D.C. jail located in the northern Virginia suburbs, The Afro-Anarchists were being thrown into a cell. It was a situation that the three of them, like many young black males in the D.C. area, had long ago come to expect as a rite of passage.
As the door slammed shut behind them, Bucktooth spoke. "Man, Phosphate, they didn't read us our rights or nothin'."
"Yeah, Phos," Fontaine chimed in, "I didn't think they had to beat us, neither. And whoever heard of being charged with singing too loud and off-key in a public establishment? I don't believe there is no kind of law for that shit. ~ Donald Jeffries

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart. ~ Mitch Landrieu

In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs. ~ Carlos Wallace

It is not really a "Negro revolution" that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you'd be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody's history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad. ~ James Baldwin

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys. ~ Toni Morrison

When I got off the train back home, I saw the WHITE and COLORED signs that had been there all along, as it it was the first time. ~ Dorothy Hampton Marcus

Because it is psychological. I see the boys in the park, the young boys, smoking and playing basketball when they should be in school. I couldn't understand why when I first arrived. Now, I am starting to see. It is because they have been told in school, in their community, on the street, that they are nothing, and so they have started to believe it. Once that happens, it is over. You can't be a man, a husband, a father. You can't do anything, once you start to believe that. ~ Sun Yung Shin

One line of King's speech in particular - that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin - was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don't see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for racism, with white people insisting that they didn't see race or, if they did, that it had no meaning to them. ~ Robin DiAngelo

When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought ... ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

At this point, I think if you're being silent, you're making a choice and taking a side. ~ Michael Bennett

Divided we are as people but if we stand together and fight we as a race will unite. ~ Alcurtis Turner

The only thing white about me is the skin I'm wearing. ~ Randolph Randy Camp

Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal.
Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on their path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them? ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us."
"Who?" Lily asked.
"Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me." ~ Bebe Moore Campbell

When white people accuse you of "pulling the race card"―don't even deny it! Tell them; "Yeah, it's the only card I've got while you enjoy a full deck. ~ Sasha Scarr

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. ~ Octavia E. Butler

If you see a group of people struggling over generations and you attribute those struggles to bad character, then you do not truly believe we are all created equally. ~ Jonathan R. Miller

There is
a heaviness in me
worth my weight in gold,
passed over for copper. ~ Olivia Barnes

When a rainbow spreads across the sky it is reminding the world that beauty comes in all colors. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

We all have a sphere of influence. Each of us needs to find our own sources of courage so that we can begin to speak. There are many problems to address, and we cannot avoid them indefinitely. We cannot continue to be silent. We must begin to speak, knowing that words alone are insufficient. But I have seen that meaningful dialogue can lead to effective action. Change is possible. ~ Beverly Daniel Tatum

He called you beautiful, for a black girl and you kissed him. It would not be the last time someone would pay you a provisional compliment, nor the last time you accept it. Back then, you had not yet realized, that those who view your beauty conditionally, undoubtedly felt the same towards your humanity. ~ Rafeif Ismail

I don't care about any theory or any philosophy or any of that shit! Blackness is visible! The idea that someone can be black, but not look black is ridiculous! White passing and all that other nonsense about being racially ambiguous but still Black is a god damned lie! The one drop rule is a lie! ~ Sasha Scarr

I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings. ~ Richard Wright

In all his imaginings, he had never envisioned her crying. He knew that her son had died, but he'd never expected that her pain might be anything he could recognize, almost as though he believed that Negroes had their own special kind of grieving ritual, another language, something other than tears they used to express their sadness. ~ Bebe Moore Campbell

I Always Knew I Carry The Key ... To The Universal Human Race,
Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Religion of Blue Circle

December 6, 1972
Netherlands, Tilburg

May 2053
Completely in Harmony
In Silence and By Silence
Amen
God ~ Petra Hermans

I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music. ~ Janis Ian

What I have always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he'd done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember. Which is why drivers compulsively record their every move, their every race, with cockpit cameras, in-car video, data mapping; a driver cannot be a witness to his own greatness. This is what Danny says. He says racing is doing. It is being a part of a moment and being aware of nothing else but that moment. Reflection must come at a later time. The great champion Julian Sabella Rosa has said: When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure not to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake. ~ Garth Stein

To some he was its champion and to others its demise, which would make no sense at all had the game not become an arena for the vitriolic national discourse over race, feminism, gender, central versus local power, and personal liberty. Every single divisive issue electrifying the American body politic has a twin in the game. It just carries a mace and a couple of fireball spells. ~ Anonymous

The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what -- not who -- we are. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among "the most powerful corporations on the planet" - hence the state's relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other.

The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny - namely, the domestic aspects of the "War on Terror." Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state's bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state's response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained - short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government's reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely - an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle ~ Kristian Williams

Can one preach at home inequality of races and nations and advocate abroad good-will towards all men? ~ Dorothy Thompson

Race, redemption and healing - that's my thing. ~ Bebe Moore Campbell

When Peter made mistakes, Wendy cheered for him anyway. One afternoon he beat her and everyone else in a race organized by Slightly. She only laughed and squeezed his wrist with easy affection and told him how fast he was. She was so undeterred by losing that it made the boys wonder if winning was exactly what they'd thought it was or if in England it was different. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

And we want to make sure that something is done to salvage what's left of this beautiful race called humans. ~ James Dashner

Ultimately, of course, there is no excuse for being fat in this culture. It's the one last prejudice we allow ourselves, the final frontier of acceptable segregation. Our political correctness is positively Californian when it comes to race, creed, origin, and orientation. But we still condemn ourselves and others for this last intolerable offense in an annoyingly tolerant society. ~ Joni Rodgers

It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was never, quite, my own idea of myself - and Malcolm was considered to be a "racist in reverse." This formulation, in terms of power - and power is the arena in which racism is acted out - means absolutely nothing: it may even be described as a cowardly formulation. The powerless, by definition, can never be "racists," for they can never make the world pay for what they feel or fear except by the suicidal endeavor which makes them fanatics or revolutionaries, or both. ~ James Baldwin

...that society with its hurtful views on race and class distinction would make it difficult for us to succeed. ~ Curtis W. Jackson

The Marathon distance is very difficult to cover and without the support of all of the fans and people cheering us on and the other runners, we would have a very difficult time to run the full race. So we work together to make a marathon happen. ~ Tilahun Regassa

Being an American, what I've noticed is that we're in such a race. You wake up and you realize you're in the middle of a race, and some people are running right by you. ~ Steven Conrad

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we we ~ Charles Darwin

The race is your face. Obviously, I come from a mixed background. Who I am and how I look and being black. ~ Neneh Cherry

A cop ascending a staircase in a white neighborhood who was so pre-terrified of the residents that he pulled the trigger at the first sound he heard would be derided as a paranoid lunatic.
Similarly, the idea that a fat white guy selling hot smokes on a street corner was a grave threat would be laughed at as absurd. But a 350-pound black man is plausibly described in the press as someone who scared pedestrians, a threat needing to be defused.
Try to imagine a world where there isn't a vast unspoken consensus that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness. Instead, they're sold as battle scenes from an occupation story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a violent alien race is easy to understand. ~ Matt Taibbi

A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed. ~ Joseph Brodsky

I'm a mixed race lad from Liverpool. I get to play a lot of hard characters, and some people perceive that's what I'm like, but it's great for me 'cos they're always the most interesting characters. ~ Stephen Graham

it was not a good idea for the human race as a whole to make contact with extraterrestrials. The impact of such contact on human society would be divisive rather than uniting, and would exacerbate rather than mitigate the conflicts between different cultures. In summary, if contact were to occur, the internal divisions within Earth civilization would be magnified and likely lead to disaster. ~ Liu Cixin

For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present for the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth. ~ James George Frazer

Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily. In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon - earned or not - because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists - all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few 'conservatives'. ~ Grover Furr

When you run a race, you hurt your ability to compete when you turn your head to look at the competition chasing you, you lose a step physically and psychologically. Run the race always stretching to do your best, imitations will come in last, no one can catch an original. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means. ~ Jacques Barzun

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Poor little wife," he murmured, cupping his hands over her bottom and urging her hard against his body. "I haven't done well by you, if you've been left so unsatisfied you had to come looking for me." He nibbled at the tender spot just beneath her ear. "I'll just have to work harder to keep up with your appetite."
"Derek," she protested, her hands working aimlessly over his shoulders as he kissed her again. Her heart began to race, and she couldn't suppress a little moan of pleasure. "I-I was just concerned that you wouldn't have enough sleep for the night."
He strung a necklace of kisses around her throat. "You were right about that. I won't. And neither will you."
"I'll never take you away from a game again," she said, feeling the need to apologize. "I didn't mean to disrupt your evening-"
"I'm glad you did," Derek murmured. He grinned as he stared into her soft blue eyes. "Any time you want me, Mrs. Craven... I'm at your service. ~ Lisa Kleypas

By the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born. ~ Michelle Alexander

When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault." But it is undeniably our inheritance. ~ Douglas A. Blackmon

Today a racist is synonymous with race hatred. Hating someone is a pretty unpleasant thing and few people are capable of hating others. Long-term hatred is a pathological disorder. ~ Steve Blake

I have never been a killer. I'm not an aggressive personality and if I can remember any emotion I felt during a race it was fear. The greatest stimulator of my running was fear. ~ Herb Elliott

This is me putting it simply; the politicians are one demographic and they see that Arizona is changing. I feel like the only instinct to retain power is to have education favor you. You have this Mexican American program that helps kids take ownership of their race and their power. It threatens the political powers that are in place. ~ Matt De La Pena

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case. ~ Peter Singer

I think that's part of the whole denial and suicidal mechanism [ of the human's race] right "Oh my God, the house is on fire." You sleep through the smoke. ~ Eve Ensler

O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children. [...] There is no old doctrine handed down among you by ancient tradition nor any science which is hoary with age, and I will tell you the reason behind this. There have been and will be again many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes, the greatest having been brought about by earth-fire and inundation. Whatever happened either in your country or ours or in any other country of which we are informed, any action which is noble and great or in any other way remarkable which has taken place, all that has been inscribed long ago in our temple records, whereas you and other nations did not keep imperishable records. And then, after a period of time, the usual inundation visits like a pestilence and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education. And thus you have to begin over again as children and know nothing of what happened in ancient times either among us or among yourselves.'
'As for those genealogies of yours which you have related to us, they are no better than tales of children; for in the first place, you remember one deluge only, whereas there were a number of them. And in the next place there dwelt in your land, which you do not know, the fairest and noblest race of men that ever lived of which you are but a seed or remnant. And this was not known to you because for many generations the survivors of that destruction made no records.'
[Spoken by a priest of Egypt] ~ Plato

Esoteric tradition teaches us that until we find the Grail, and it should be clearly understood that it is not a physical object in this time-space continuum, Lucifer must play out his role as the sacrificial king. He is doomed to incarnate in a 'cloak of flesh' as an avatar for the human race and pay the ultimate price as a scapegoat on their behalf. This is the ultimate sacrifice for being the light-bearer who brought down from Heaven the illumination of Gnostic wisdom and the primal fire of creativity. Lucifer eternally dies and is reborn to save humanity of itself. As the human race progresses spiritually so he can slowly ascend the Ladder of Lights back to the realm of the Gods beyond the Pole Star. He is the Lord of the Morning Star and the Lux Mundi (Light of the World) whose rebirth from darkness we celebrate every year at the winter solstice. ~ Nigel Jackson

The United States of America is a nation where people are not united because of those three glaring frailties: racism, injustices and inequities. ~ Yuri Kochiyama