I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful. —Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer

In The Fray Contributor

Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. —Martin Luther King Jr., American minister and activist

In The Fray Contributor

You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman. —Eldridge Cleaver, founding member of the Black Panther Party

In The Fray Contributor

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough. —Germaine Greer, writer, broadcaster, academic, and feminist

In The Fray Contributor

Understanding is a two-way street. —Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady

In The Fray Contributor

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. —Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist

In The Fray Contributor

It’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego. —bell hooks, black feminist social critic

In The Fray Contributor

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it. —Lewis H. Lapham, American writer and editor

In The Fray Contributor

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself. —Jane Addams

In The Fray Contributor

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. —Eldridge Cleaver, founding member of the Black Panther Party

In The Fray Contributor

And who knows? Somewhere out there in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse. I wish him well! —Barbara Bush, former First Lady

In The Fray Contributor