A Quote by Glenn Loury

My sermon for us Americans would be to construct the kind of institutions of mutuality and social cooperation that don't leave 15 or 20 percent of our people falling through the cracks. We can do it. It's not like we don't know what to do. It's not like there aren't models there. It's not like this isn't being done elsewhere. It's not like we can't afford to do it. It's a question of political will and it's about our definition as a people.
Before I transitioned, I felt like I could walk on stage and just, like, say anything and people would just laugh. And that's kind of a privilege that I just lost through the layers of social context and me being visibly a political object in a lot of people's brains.
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Black people have, like, this thing, and I have it, we all have it, we have this kind of embarrassment. Where we don't like white people to find out our little insecurities and out little quirks. We don't really like that that much. It's kind of, we're like, 'Don't let them know - that ours; that's for us.'
Americans are good people. They have no aggressions against us and they like us as we like them. They must know I don't hate them. I love them.... I hear it is a complex society inside. Many Americans don't know about the outside world. The majority have no concern and no information about other people. They could not even find Africa on a map. I think Americans are good, but America will be taken over and destroyed from the inside by the Zionist lobby. The Americans do not see this. They are getting decadent. Zionists will use this to destroy them.
Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.
The fact that refugees traveled through six other countries, like former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, is because they like our social benefits. They like our welfare state. They know which country to pick. They're not going to stay in Hungary or in Estonia. They come to Germany, to Holland. And people sense that those are not the real refugees. And our government has spent billions of euros on them, and the Dutch people know.
Today, Americans of all political stripes are coming to a similar, sad realization about our president. A recent Fox News poll asked Americans 'How often does Barack Obama lie to the country on important matters?' Thirty-seven percent said 'most of the time,' 24 percent said 'some of the time,' and 20 percent said 'only now and then.' Just 15% said 'never.'
I didn't really know what to expect, but I thought there aren't a lot of rap groups that can say they have a documentary done about them, so my attitude was like, 'Shoot, why not?' I'm sure there are a lot of people that would like to take our place. I felt like we should all embrace it.
I would say that the powerful, revolutionary thing about Jesus' message is that he says, 'What do you do with the people that aren't like you? What do you do with the Other? What do you do with the person that's hardest to love?' . . . That's the measure of a good religion, is - you can love the people who are just like you; that's kind of easy. So what Jesus does is takes the question and talks about fruit. He's interested in what you actually produce. And that's a different discussion. How do we love the people in the world that are least like us?
I'd like to help struggling homeowners who can't pay their mortgages, I'd like to invest in our crumbling infrastructure, I'd like to reform the tax system so multimillionaires can't pretend their earnings are capital gains and pay at the rate of 15 percent. I'd like to make public higher education free, and pay for it with a small transfer tax on all financial transactions. I'd like to do much more - a new new deal for Americans. But Republicans are blocking me at every point.
There's like a shift in the paradigm about every 15 years in movies because one would slip through the cracks. I think if they were more inexpensive you would see many more eclectic comedies being made.
I think one of the core ideas in America has always been conversation and being able to question our systems of government, and being able to dictate our own communities and how we want this country to work. And I feel like we're losing part of that because of the way that even our current political campaign is centered more around celebrity than anything else, and so we're kind of losing conversation. We're still having conversations, but they seem to be more about like Donald Trump's hair and like memes of his face more than anything else.
I think people will lie to pollsters. I think the truth of Obama and what people think of Obama is when you ask people about his agenda and then nobody likes anything. They don't like Obamacare. They don't like the Iran policy. They don't like taxes. They don't like anything he's done. But you put him in the question and people get scared to say anything negative because of the racial component.
There are people who wish to do us harm in the most heinous way. They want to kill Americans simply because they are Americans. They wish to destroy our culture and Nation because they don't like our freedoms, they don't like the fact that we are prosperous.
I feel very strongly about letting people know I'm proud of who I am. I want people to know when they hear my songs it's coming from a specific place. The new record is specifically for us trans women: that we can sing about our pain, being ostracized by our lovers, who are ashamed of us in a way. There's no pop music like that for our community. I wanted to contribute in that way.
It's helpful to just hear things through friends' ears, people who know you well. I guess when I started Dirty Projectors, when I was, like, 20, I always imagined it would be kind of like an amphibious vehicle: something that could go with me wherever I need to go. That kind of constant change has been in the DNA from the beginning.
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