The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “politics”

James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe’s Forgotten Conversation About Beauty, Morality, and the Political Power of Art
James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe’s Forgotten Conversation About Beauty, Morality, and the Political Power of Art

“Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”

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Adrienne Rich on the Political Power of Poetry and Its Role in the Immigrant Experience
Adrienne Rich on the Political Power of Poetry and Its Role in the Immigrant Experience

“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”

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Neil Gaiman on Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience
Neil Gaiman on Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience

“Truth is not in what happens but in what it tells us about who we are.”

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Thoreau on How to Use Civil Disobedience to Advance Justice
Thoreau on How to Use Civil Disobedience to Advance Justice

“Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

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Geographical Fun: A Victorian Teenage Girl’s Impressive Cartographic Caricatures of European Countries and Their National Stereotypes
Geographical Fun: A Victorian Teenage Girl’s Impressive Cartographic Caricatures of European Countries and Their National Stereotypes

Within a humorous gem, a serious reminder of how malleable even the seeming solidities of geopolitics are.

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Young Barack Obama on What His Mother Taught Him About Love
Young Barack Obama on What His Mother Taught Him About Love

“Perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer.”

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Baudelaire on the Political and Humanitarian Power of Art: An Open Letter to Those in Power and of Privilege
Baudelaire on the Political and Humanitarian Power of Art: An Open Letter to Those in Power and of Privilege

“Art is an infinitely precious possession, a refreshing and warming drink that restores the stomach and the mind to the natural balance of the ideal.”

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Chelsea Clinton Reads James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Role in Society
Chelsea Clinton Reads James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Role in Society

“The war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”

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The Power of Solidarity in the Conquest of Justice: How Sixteen White Poets Banded Against Police Brutality and Stood Up for Amiri Baraka in 1968
The Power of Solidarity in the Conquest of Justice: How Sixteen White Poets Banded Against Police Brutality and Stood Up for Amiri Baraka in 1968

A beacon of searing solidarity by Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other politically awake titans of poetic might.

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E.B. White on Nuclear Weapons and What It Really Takes to Live in a Peaceful World
E.B. White on Nuclear Weapons and What It Really Takes to Live in a Peaceful World

“Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.”

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