Domination to-day is not a product of armies or navies or wealth or policies. It is a domination based on the one hand upon accomplished unity, and on the other hand upon the fact that opposition is generally characterized by a high degree of disunity.
Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923).
You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
James Baldwin and Margaret Mead: A Rap on Race (1971).
They constantly try to escape
Thomas Stearns Eliot, Choruses from The Rock (1934).
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
W. H. Auden, Epitaph on a Tyrant (1939).
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
If anybody ever attacked democracy, I might discover what the word means.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939).
Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation,” The Nation (July 7, 1956), published in book form in The Price of the Ticket (1985).