We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.
Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.
You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. You can’t save the people if you don’t serve the people.
I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. – Aristotle.
There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on.
Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.
There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.
Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.
The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.
The rage is still there but I found the right kind of channel, because it’s tied to a love, it’s tied to a struggle for justice. And most importantly, for me, it’s tied to a recognition that I am a cracked vessel.
You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It’s a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.
It’s a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what’s right and what’s good. It’s just stuck, and they can’t get it out because there’s too much greed. There’s too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.
To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely – to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.