A Quote by Condoleezza Rice
Race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident,real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counterproductive.
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Only one time have I had Twitter open when I was doing a game, and after that I took it off my phone. I said, 'This is so counterproductive. I'm actually reacting to people reacting to what I'm saying, and it can't work that way.'
I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense that we shape our stories, so anything that even happens on the news gets shaped in a certain way and gets a texture, and that the imagined can be real.
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.
The X Factor is something that's real. Once you find that X Factor, it's undeniable. No matter what the critics say about our band, we obviously have the X Factor. Redfoo has got the X Factor.
It's the media that take an isolated incident and make it a deciding factor in a presidential campaign, as opposed to the real issues, like abortion, the homeless, the deficit. The same is true with actors and their lifestyles.
What I really hope for, ultimately, is that the closet will be a non-factor in American politics in a couple of decades.
I still think that we have a hesitance to talk about things racial. And I think we do it at our detriment. We go from incident to incident, and we have spikes in which race becomes something that we talk about, as opposed to talking about race in those less contentious times when I think we might make more progress.
... the connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct. American attitudes to American "greatness", to hierarchies of race, to the perils of "other" revolutions (the American revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured, the realities of empire, while apologists for overseas American interests have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom.
As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn't get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
Our children... deserve to grow up in an environment where fear is not their constant companion. And I'm determined to do everything I can to make sure every kid - in every neighborhood regardless of zip code, economic status and race or ethnicity - is able to live a life of safety.
As a result of the incident and subsequent media coverage, I have been forced to leave my home, my school, my employer, my family and ultimately, my entire life.
Every race I've been in, I calculated race into the equation. If you're in America, you calculate it into the equation. It is a factor. I never make it an issue. I don't run the campaign wearing it on my sleeve, but I don't run away from it, either.
I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
Happy Endings are an illusion. Real life is filled with brief moments of fleeting happiness, but ultimately every life is a tragedy that ends in death and grief.
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