“The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.”

What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.

And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.

The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.

The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.

Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.

In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.

This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.

[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.

I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

Not suffering another existence is reaching the Way.

According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.

They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the drifting scent of honeysuckle, and the delicious smell of wild thyme crushed under their bodies. A reed-warbler sang a beautiful little song in the reeds below, and then another answered.

“Heaven help us,” said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.

If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it’s own reward?

Do not expect good from another’s death.