45
" Thomas Paine is America’s single great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists (Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky), and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups (Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West, and bell hooks). But we do not have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique. "
― Chris Hedges , Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
48
" She had read and reread the speech the Socialist Eugene V. Debs made to a federal court in Cleveland before he went to prison for opposing the draft in World War I. His words, she said, had become her own. “Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth,” Debs said. “I said it then, as I say it now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. "
― Chris Hedges , Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
59
" The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” Baldwin writes, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. "
― Chris Hedges , Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt