Give ThemBread & Circuses- Julius Caesar

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus.

...the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

I don’t know how someone controlled you. They bought and sold you.

A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.

We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.

The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.r

I got a shiny saw blade
All I need’s a volunteer
I’ll cut you in half
While smilin’ in your ear
And the freedom that you sought
Driftin’ like a ghost amongst the trees

When one researches organized, structured and largely invisible violence, there are times one must ask if it is more important to strictly follow a professional code or to intervene.

Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.

All the early Roman kings
In their sharkskin suits
Bow ties and buttons
High top boots
Drivin’ the spikes in
Blazin’ the rails
Nailed in their coffins
In top hats and tails

The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

He saw the hands that build
Can also pull down

I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

My heartbeat’s rhythm is a lonesome sound
Just like the rubber turning on the ground
Always lost and nowhere bound

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.

In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.

Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts?
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt

In their styes with all their backing
In their eyes there’s something lacking
Everywhere there’s lots of piggies

Living piggy lives

Music is an indirect force for change, because it provides an anchor against human tragedy. In this sense, it works towards a reconciled world. It can also be the direct experience of change. At certain points during some shows, the reconciled world is already here, at least in that second, at that place.

Certainly fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters. The people — the people — are the rightful masters of both congresses, and courts — not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

There aren’t any great men. There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet. All problems become smaller if you don’t dodge them but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Well rich man want the power and the seat on the top
Poor man want the money that the rich man got

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

I am not afraid of the darkness. Real death is preferable to a life without living.

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just-

You can run all your life
But not go anywhere

She took me outside to the churchyard
Showed me graves on the ground and she said
There lies a man who fought for equality
There lies a boy who died in his struggle
Can all these heroes die in vain?

Peep out my manuscript
Things will remain the same until I change ‘em
I can’t be faded
There’s three types of people in the world:
Those who don’t know what happened
Those who wonder what happened
And people like us, that make things happen.

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease Aequanimitas!

Each person possesses and inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?

There’s a cold wind blowing down my old road
Down the backstreets where the pines grow
Where the river splits the undertows
There’s a stranger living in me
I’m all alone here living in darkness

Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow,
What a lot of fleeting matters you have spurned.
Several seasons with their treasons,
Wrap the babe in scarlet colors, call it your own.
Did he doubt or did he try? Answers aplenty in the bye and bye,
Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills,
One man gathers what another man spills.

I’m at the sea, and I can hear the trains
Winds of change, so new
Blow right through me and blow back through you
And pull you into the light.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education… no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly – not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

In science and in medicine
I was a stranger, you took me in

This train carries saints and sinners
This train carries losers and winners
This train carries whores and gamblers
This train carries lost souls
I said, this train carries broken-hearted
This train thieves and sweet souls departed
This train carries fools and kings
This train, all aboard
I said, this train dreams will not be thwarted
This train faith will be rewarded
This train hear the steel wheels singin’
This train bells of freedom ringin’
Come on this train
People get ready
You don’t need no ticket
All you got do is just get on board.
Come on this train.

These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be
Someday you’ll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And you’ll no longer burn to be
Brothers in arms

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Give me a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the world.” These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Slaves
Hebrews born to serve
To the pharaoh
Heed
To his every word
Live in fear
Faith
Of the unknown one
The deliverer
Wait
Something must be done
Four hundred years.

Yes, I’d give my life to lay my head tonight
On a bed of California stars

Your a little star struck innuendos
Inadequacies an’ foreign bodies,
And the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane
Numbs my brain,
And the sunlight shining through the crack in the window pane
Numbs my brain, oh Lord.
Ha, so open up the window and let me breathe.
The cool room, Lord is a fool’s room.
The cool room, Lord is a fool’s room.
And I can almost smell your T.B. sheets

I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

The souls in Purgatory that come back to habitations and familiar spots
Re-live
their transgressions

I’m aware of the time we lost
Like a demon in the doorway, waiting to be born
But I’m here all alone, just begging
Pull me close and let me hold you in
Give me the deeper understanding of who I am
I’m moving back again, I’m waiting.

Lead me through the light
Pull me from the water
Hold my hand and something turns to me
Turns me into you
Just see it through my eyes
Love me like no other
Hold my hand and something turns to me
Turns me into you
Turn in me
Into you.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he not busy being born
Is busy dying
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in.

I wish I was a headlight on a north-bound train
I’d shine my light through the cool Colorado rain.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

Inaction may be the biggest form of action

He comes in the morning when the air is still,
He races the sun and he always will.
We raise up the window and call through the trees,
Oh we’d love to fly with you, Gabriel and me.

I dreamt we were standing
By the banks of the Thames
Where the cold grey waters ripple
In the misty morning light
Held a match to your cigarette
Watched the smoke curl in the mist
Your eyes, blue as the ocean between us
Smiling at me
I awoke so cold and lonely
In a faraway place
The sun fell cold upon my face
The cracks in the ceiling spelt hell
Turned to the wall
Pulled the sheets around my head
Tried to sleep, and dream my way
Back to you again
Count the days
Slowly passing by
Step on a plane
And fly away
I’ll see you then
As the dawn birds sing
On a cold and misty morning
By the Albert Bridge.

All down in the county Kildare
So be easy and free when you’re drinking with me
I’m a man you don’t meet every day

Oh the torn up ticket stubs
From a hundred thousand mugs
Now washed away with dead dreams in the rain
And the car-parks going up
And they’re pulling down the pubs
And it’s just another bloody rainy day

Oh sweet city of my dreams
Of speed and skill and schemes
Like Atlantis you just disappeared from view
And the hare upon the wire
Has been burnt upon your pyre
Like the black dog that once raced
Out from trap two.

Oh, she may be weary
Young girls they do get weary
Wearing that same old shaggy dress
But when she gets weary
Try a little tenderness.

Step right up, step right up
And step right up, ballerina
Crowd will catch you
Fly it, sigh it, try it
When you came up to me
Child, you were heading for a fall
Lonely twenty-two story block
in New York City , twenty-two story block
And step right up and step right up
And step right up
Just like a ballerina
Crowd will catch you
Fly it, sight it, c’mon, die it
Get on up, get on up
Keep a-moving, a-moving on, a-moving on, a-moving up.

I’m going to tear my hair out just for you
If you don’t believe what I’m singing
At three o’clock in the morning, babe, while
I’m singing my song for you.

There is a girl in New York City
Who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I’m falling, flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
“Whoa, so this is what she means”
She means we’re bouncing into Graceland.

Everyday, you could see the scars
Of hurt from the past
Which got me thinking of
My very own, so called friend.

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Every act of perception,” Edelman writes, “is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination. We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes. We’ve lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different. They don’t seem to be of our creation. They don’t seem to be under our control. They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.

I will always do the good I can for a hatred I can’t withstand
And I hope you feel the same way with you
The goodness of your works will carry you through
Do good onto others and Jah will do the same for you
Give it a try my friend and you will prove what I’m saying is true.

‘Cause love is more precious than gold
It can’t be bought, no, never could be sold
I got love enough to share
That makes me a millionaire
When the kisses fall from everywhere
Life reaches on, millionaire
When the pocket’s are empty and the cupboard is bare
I still feel like a millionaire.

Thank you for your wine, California
Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruits.

Everyday the people are dying
You’ll find your redemption
And then you give us the teachings of his majesty
For we no want no devil philosophy
A you forgive us the teachings of his majesty
A we no want no devil philosophy
Feel it in the one drop
And we still find time to rap
We’re making the one stop
And we filling the gap
So feel this drumbeat
As it beats within
Playing a riddim, uh!
Fighting against ism and skism.

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell
Blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

Who was born in a house full of pain.
Who was trained not to spit in the fan.
Who was told what to do by the man.
Who was broken by trained personnel.
Who was fitted with collar and chain.
Who was given a pat on the back.
Who was breaking away from the pack.
Who was only a stranger at home.
Who was ground down in the end.
Who was found dead on the phone.
Who was dragged down by the stone.

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief. Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;–I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life…I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me. We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out…we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night…and thus we wait for morning.

The peasants watched the trains with curiosity, listening intently to the strange humming sound of the human throng, neither groan, cry, nor song. The train went by, and as it pulled away one could still see against the dark background of the forest disembodied human arms waving tirelessly from the windows. It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone knew only himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effectively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank. Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens.

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

Gotta try to stay above water, y’know?
Just stay busy, stay working
Puff told me, like, the key to this joint
The key to staying on top of things
Is treat everything like it’s your first project, nomsayin’?
Like it’s your first day, like, back when you was an intern
Like, that’s how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry.

If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they’d be the like of the holy prophets, I’m thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl. Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law. Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver, In her guts a galling give her.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances…. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.

Ever since they left Thies, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending. It rolled out over its own length, like the movement of a serpent. It was as long as a life.

Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mould it and those committed to breaking it up; those who aim to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow […] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes.

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world. With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others—or, in a word, partnership.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Man’s true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities. Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it.

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda. This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.

Riches, prestige, everything can be lost. But the happiness in your heart can only be dimmed; it will always be there as long as you live, to make you happy again. Whenever you’re feeling lonely or sad, try going to the loft on a beautiful day and looking outside. Not at the houses and the rooftops, but at the sky. As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you’ll know that your pure within and will find happiness once more.

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions. This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.

The human person is in danger: this is certain, the human person is in danger today, here is the urgency of human ecology! And it is a serious danger because the cause of the problem is not superficial but profound: it is not just a matter of economics, but of ethics and anthropology.

Now I’m holding a dub, sitting on swoll
27 years old, up for parole, stroll
I’m back up on my feet with my mind on the money
That I’ll make as soon as I touch the streets
Things done changed on this side
Remember they used to thump, but now they blast, right?
But it ain’t no thing to me
Cause now I’m what they call a loced-assed OG
The little homies from the hood with grip
Are the ones I get with cause I’m down to set trip
I’m bigger than you, so what you wanna do?
Didn’t know he had a .22
Straight sitting behind his back
I grabbed his pockets and then I heard six caps
I fell to the ground with blood on my hands
I didn’t understand
How a brother so young could bust a cap
I used to be the same way back
I guess that’s what I get (For what?)
For trying to jack them little homies for they grip.

Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

Everyone is crying out for peace, yes
None is crying out for justice
Everyone is crying out for peace, yes
None is crying out for justice
I don’t want no peace
I need equal rights and justice
Everyone is talking about crime
Tell me who are the criminals?

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Your name is big brother
You say that you’re watching me on the tele,
Seeing me go nowhere,
Your name is big brother,
You say that you’re tired of me protesting,
Children dying everyday,
My name is nobody
But I can’t wait to see your face inside my door
Your name is big brother
You say that you got me all in your notebook,
Writing it down everyday,
Your name is I’ll see ya,
I’ll change if you vote me in as the pres,
The President of your soul
I live in the ghetto,
You just come to visit me ’round election time.

And when they come to march on ya
Tell ’em to make sure they got their James Brown pass
And don’t be surprised if Ali is in the White House
Reverend Ike, Secretary of the Treasure
Richard Pryor, Minister of Education
Stevie Wonder, Secretary of Fine Arts
And Miss Aretha Franklin, First Lady.
Chocolate City is no dream, it’s my piece of the rock
And I dig you, CC
God bless Chocolate City and its Vanilla suburbs
Gainin’ on ya.

There is nothing that interests me more than medical research and the quest for better living facilities, and better health and better medical standards, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. This, to me is where we should be concentrating our greatest efforts. In fact, possibly – I might say that I feel it could be more important than some of the space activity.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free
(America never was America to me.)

Let it be that great strong land of love
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
(It never was America to me.)
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

But opportunity is real, and life is free,
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
I am the red man driven from the land,
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
And finding only the same old stupid plan

Tangled in that ancient endless chain
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
I am the man who never got ahead.
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.
The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).
There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

Você é assim
Um sonho pra mim
E quando eu não te vejo
Eu penso em você
Desde o amanhecer
Até quando eu me deito
Eu gosto de você
E gosto de ficar com você
Meu riso é tão feliz contigo
O meu melhor amigo é o meu amor
E a gente canta
E a gente dança
E a gente não se cansa
De ser criança
A gente brinca
Na nossa velha infância
Eu gosto de você
E gosto de ficar com você
Meu riso é tão feliz contigo
O meu melhor amigo é o meu amor
Você é assim
Um sonho pra mim
Você é assim
Você é assim
Um sonho pra mim
Você é assim

Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.

New Jersey Turnpike riding on a wet night
‘Neath the refinery’s glow out where the great black rivers flow
License, registration, I ain’t got none
But I got a clear conscience ’bout the things that I done
I saw her standin’ on her front lawn just twirlin’ her baton
Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died
From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska with a sawed off .410 on my lap
Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path
I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun
The jury brought in a guilty verdict and the judge he sentenced me to death
Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest
Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor head back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin’ right there on my lap
They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my soul’d be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.

I saw cotton and I saw black. Tall white mansions and little shacks. Southern man, when will you pay them back? I heard screamin’ and bullwhips crackin’. How long? How long? Southern man, better keep your head. Don’t forget what your good book said. Southern change gonna come at last. Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern man.

Freedom may never be conceived merely negatively, as the absence of compulsion. Freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual. No one is free until we are all free. Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.

Staring in the space that you fishing for a phrase
Uninspired and your mind, still it’s all a paper chase
First you over dedicate, then you notice that you great
And you been the whole time then it slap you in yo face
Then you stack it in your safe, got it crackin’, it was fate

If we do not change our negative habits toward climate change, we can count on worldwide disruptions in food production, resulting in mass migration, refugee crises and increased conflict over scarce natural resources like water and farm land. This is a recipe for major security problems. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is just to stay human.

No te comprendo, no entiendo que paso
Si te di todo, quizás te di de mas
Dime que falto, dime que sobro, dime que paso
Pero dime algo, que me estoy muriendo
Quien detendrá la lluvia en mi, oh no, no
Se me ha inundado el corazón
Quien detendrá la lluvia en mi, oh mi amor
Solo tu puedes pararla

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolet’s.

When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town’s eastern edge. I don’t like coffee but I like that smell. It’s comforting; it unites the town in a common sensory experience; it’s good industry, like the roaring rug mill that fills our ears, brings work and signals our town’s vitality. There is a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink themselves drunk on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town.

But I remember us riding in my brother’s car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse?

Nineteen eighty seven in the east bay cold as hell it’s the middle of summer
Me and Jesse and Matt and Dave Mello, he was the drummer
My momma said you better watch your back boy
Keep your head up and be a shot blocker
On the outside looking in wit the freaks and the thugs and all the punk rockers
They say I’m outta step in this world so step back man I ain’t gonna warn ya
Here’s a message for the disenfranchised of East bay California
In a dream you take a trip
Down Shattuck to Durant
Up the hill, to the steps, Sproul Plaza and Telegraph
You pass Channing you pass Derby
You go to Ashby down to Adeline
Take MLK to 54th and go down
To Genoa yeah and follow the Bart tracks
To Harmon Street, Harmon Street
Yeah it’s reoccurring, it’s like a dream
I live a thousand times, yeah
And it’s always like the very first time.

I was driving home early Sunday morning through Bakersfield
Listening to gospel music on the colored radio station
And the preacher said, you know you always have the Lord by your side
And I was so pleased to be informed of this that I ran
Twenty red lights in his honor
Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord.

Put me on a plate with petals and a fire
And send me out to sea
Turn my angry sword against my heart
And let me free
The dawn holds the heaviness of the night
I’ve heard the restless sighs and lovers lies
The brook, the beach and seen the devil’s eyes
So bring me home.

Yesterday and days before
Sun is cold and rain is hard
I know been that way for all my time
‘Til forever, on it goes
Through the circle, fast and slow,
I know it can’t stop, I wonder.

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor come
Sayin’ somethin’ about me
There were children singin’ and drummers drummin’
The archer split the tree
There was a fanfare blowin’ to the sun
That floated on the breeze
We got mother nature on the run, in the nineteen seventies.

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood
Cries out, “My God, they killed them all!”
Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin’ that he never done
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell
That’s the story of the Hurricane
But it won’t be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time he’s done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Lately things are on my mind
Good news is hard to find
And I work on the factory line
And all I do is stay behind
Call my mama like I should
She says daddy ain’t doin’ too good
Me and him should wait in line
Just can’t seem to find the time
But I love my life
Man it’s, something to see
It’s the kids and the dogs and you and me
It’s the way it’s all right
Everything goes wrong
It’s a sound of a slow, simple song

Mom, wherever there’s a cop beating a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there’s a fight against the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me, Mom, I’ll be there
Wherever somebody’s fighting for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody’s struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Ma, and you’ll see me

Made up my mind to make a new start
Going to California with an aching in my heart.
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.

It’s the “Godfather Buried Alive”
Ayo Po it’s the Ill Na Na stuntin’ in 5.0
Went to Brooklyn with the Rugers out
In Flatbush and I keeps the Kiki poppin’ off when the goons is out.

I’ll be out of here before the break of dawn,
hit the highway, smoke a big cigar,
gonna stop and bury the cash
then get some more
There’s only one thing on my mind,
that’s makin’ across that ol’ state line
amid a hail of avenging bullets
that are meant for me.

I’m a hustler baby
I just want you to know
It ain’t where I been
But where I’m boust to go.

He pulls a prayer book out of his sleeping bag
Preacher lights up a butt and he takes a drag
Waiting for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
In a cardboard box ‘neath the underpass
You got a one-way ticket to the promised land
You got a hole in your belly and a gun in your hand
Sleeping on a pillow of solid rock
Bathing in the city’s aqueduct.

Baby, out in the street I don’t feel sad or blue
Baby, out in the street I’ll be waiting for you
When I’m out in the street
Pretty girls, they’re all passing by
When I’m out in the street
From the corner, we give them the eye
Baby, out in the street I just feel all right
Meet me out in the street, little girl, tonight
Meet me out in the street
Meet me out in the street.

Well there’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.

The next generation, it’s what not who we are facin’
The fingers pointed to us in our direction
The blind state of mind needs correction
Word to the mother we tighten connection
To be a man you need no election

’m tired of bein’ poor and even worse I’m black
My stomach hurts so I’m lookin’ for a purse to snatch
Cops give a damn about a negro
Pull the trigger kill a brother he’s a hero
Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares
One less hungry mouth on the welfare
First ship ’em dope and let ’em deal the brothers
Give ’em guns step back watch ’em kill each other
And although it seems heaven sent
We ain’t ready, to see a black President
It ain’t a secret don’t conceal the fact
The penitentiary’s packed, and it’s filled with blacks
But some things will never change
Try to show another way but you stayin’ in the dope game
Now tell me what’s a mother to do?
Bein’ real don’t appeal to the brother in you
And still I see no changes can’t a brother get a little peace?
It’s war on the streets and the war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty they got a war on drugs
So the police can bother me
And I ain’t never did a crime I ain’t have to do
But now I’m back with the blacks givin’ it back to you
Don’t let ’em jack you up, back you up,
Crack you up and pimp smack you up

These felonies be like prophecies
Begging me to stop
’cause These lawyers getting money
Every time they knock us
Slashing pockets lyrically
Suckers fled when they notice
Switched my name to Makaveli
Had the rap game closed
Expose foes, with my hocus pocus flows
They froze
Now suckers idealize my chosen Blows
More money mean litigating
More Player hating
Got a cell at the Penn for me waiting
Is this my fate?
Hit me with that misdemeanor thinking
Me fall back
Never That
Too much Tequila drinking
We all that
Make them understand me
Hey I’ll stay all night out with my Posse
Everyone roll with me is family
‘Cause everybody’s got me
Watch me paint a perfect vision
This life we living
Got us all meeting up in Prison
Last week I got a letter from my road dog
Written in Blood
Saying, “Please show a young player love”
Hold your head
Hold it

Oh, you sit and wonder just who’s gonna stop the rain?
Who’ll ease the sadness, who’s gonna quiet your pain?
It’s a long dark highway and a thin white line
Connecting baby, your heart to mine
We’re runnin’ now but darlin’ we will stand in time
To face the ties that bind
The ties that bind
Now you can’t break the ties that bind
You can’t forsake the ties that bind.

Were such things here as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten on the insane root
That takes the reason prisoner?

Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods
I ran till I thought my chest would explode
There in the clearing, beyond the highway
In the moonlight, our wedding house shone
I rushed through the yard
I burst through the front door, my head pounding hard
Up the stairs I climbed
The room was dark, our bed was empty
Then I heard that long whistle whine
And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried
Now I swing a sledge hammer on a railroad gang
Knocking down them cross ties, working in the rain
Now, don’t it feel like you’re a rider on a downbound train?

I say no wealth is worth my life! Not all they claim
was stored in the depths of Troy, that city built on riches,
in the old days of peace before the sons of Achaea came-
not all the gold held fast in the Archer’s rocky vaults,
in Phoebus Apollo’s house on Pytho’s sheer cliffs!
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man’s life breath cannot come back again-
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.
Mother tells me,
the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
that two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies…
true, but the life that’s left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.

I’m watching the water
Watching the coast
Suddenly I know
What I want the most
And I want to tell you
Still I hold back
I need some time
Get my life on track
I know that look on your face
But there’s somethin’ lucky about this place
And there’s somethin’ good comin’
For you and me
Somethin’ good comin’
There has to be.

He came dancing across the water
With his galleons and guns
Looking for the new world
In that palace in the sun.
On the shore lay Montezuma
With his coca leaves and pearls
In his halls he often wondered
With the secrets of the worlds.
And his subjects
Gathered ’round him
Like the leaves around a tree
In their clothes of many colors
For the angry gods to see.
And the women all were beautiful
And the men stood
Straight and strong
They offered life in sacrifice
So that others could go on.

Devil and the deep blue sea behind me
Vanish in the air you’ll never find me
I will turn your face to alabaster
When you’ll find your servant is your master.

Need a shot of salvation, baby, once in a while
Hear the whistle blowing, hear it for a thousand miles.

So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all
That you can’t trust freedom
When it’s not in your hands
When everybody’s fightin’
For their promised land
I don’t need your civil war It feeds the rich while it buries the poor Your power hungry sellin’ soldiers In a human grocery store
My hands are tied
For all I’ve seen has changed my mind
But still the wars go on as the years go by
With no love of God or human rights
‘Cause all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars.

When I find out all the reasons
Maybe I’ll find another way
Find another day
With all the changing seasons of my life
Maybe I’ll get it right next time
An now that you’ve been broken down
Got your head out of the clouds
You’re back down on the ground
And you don’t talk so loud
An you don’t walk so proud
Any more, and what for
Well I jumped into the river
Too many times to make it home
I’m out here on my own, an drifting all alone
If it doesn’t show give it time
To read between the lines.- Guns N' Roses, Estranged, Use Your Illusion II, 1991

I keep my currency in stacks, California’s where I’m at

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. Find the best in everybody. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out.

Forget your lust for the rich man’s gold
All that you need is in your soul
Be something you love and understand
Baby be a simple kind of man
Boy, don’t you worry, you’ll find yourself
Follow your heart and nothing else.

So funky I can’t help it, boy
Neck bones, candy yams, turnips
It’s for the snake
It’s for the snake
Drift straight
Crackin’ bread

Been in the game for about 10 years or more
Talking about shit you never did before
You know my macking is cracking, all of the time
24-7 spittin’ playboy rhymes
I got a serious grind and it sure ain’t fake
You slang D? Well I’m a slang a gang of tapes
Something funky fresh for you to ride to, fool
Bending corners in the old school.

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

Sheets of empty canvas
Untouched sheets of clay
Were laid spread out before me
As her body once did
All five horizons
Revolved around her soul
As the earth to the sun
Now the air I tasted and breathed
Has taken a turn
Oh and all I taught her was everything
Oh I know she gave me all that she wore
And now my bitter hands
Chafe beneath the clouds
Of what was everything
Oh the pictures have
All been washed in black
Tattooed everything
I take a walk outside
I’m surrounded by
Some kids at play
I can feel their laughter
So why do I sear
Oh, and twisted thoughts that spin
Round my head
I’m spinning
Oh, I’m spinning
How quick the sun can, drop away

Well now on a summer night, oh in a dusky room
Come a little piece of the Lord’s undying light
Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon
In his mother’s arms it was all the beauty I could take
Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make
Oh, in a world so hard and dirty so fouled and confused
Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy
I found living proof
Well, I put my heart and soul, babe, I put ’em high upon a shelf
Right next to the faith, the faith that I’d lost in myself
I went down into the desert city
Just tryin’ so hard to shed my skin
I crawled deep into some kind of darkness
Lookin’ to burn out every trace of who I’d been
You do some sad, sad things baby
When it’s your you ‘re tryin’ to lose
You do some sad and hurtful things
I’ve seen living proof
You shot through my anger and rage
To show me my prison was just an open cage
There were no keys no guards
Oh, just one frightened man and some old shadows for bars
Well now all that’s sure on the boulevard
Is that life is just a house of cards
As fragile as each and every breath
Of this boy sleepin’ in our bed
Tonight let’s lie beneath the eaves, babe
Just a close band of happy thieves
And when that train comes we’ll get on board
And steal what we can from the treasures, treasures of the Lord
It’s been along long drought baby
Tonight the rain’s pourin’ down on our roof
Oh, looking for a little bit of God’s mercy
I found living proof
Oh living proof
I found living proof
Yeah, living proof
I found living proof

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer.

Listen to your words They’ll tell you what to do Listen over the rhythm that’s confusing you Listen to the reed in the saxophone Listen over the hum of the radio Listen over the sounds of blades in rotation Listen through the traffic and circulation Listen as hope and peace try to rhyme Listen over marching bands playing out their time Wake up Wake up dead man Wake up Wake up dead man Jesus Were you just around the corner? Did you think to try and warn her? Or are you working on something new? If there’s and order In all of this disorder Is it like a tape recorder? Can we rewind it just once more.

Where you live should not decide
Whether you live or whether you die.

We were prisoners of love, a love in chains
He was standin’ in the door, I was standin’ in the rain
With the same hot blood burning in our veins
Adam raised a Cain In the darkness of your room
Your mother calls you by your true name
You remember the faces, the places, the names
You know it’s never over, it’s relentless as the rain
Adam raised a Cain In the Bible Cain slew Abel
And East of Eden mama he was cast
You’re born into this life paying
For the sins of somebody else’s past
Well Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames

Now I got a head like a lit cigarette
Unholy clouds reflect in a minaret
So high above me, higher than everyone
Where are you in the cedars of Lebanon?
Choose your enemies carefully, ’cause they will define you
Make them interesting ’cause in some ways they will mind you
They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friends.

I tied myself with wire
To let the horses run free
Playing with the fire
Until the fire played with me
My body’s now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control.

Northside
Just across the river to the Southside
That’s a long way here
All the green and all the gold
If the door is open it isn’t theft
You can’t return to where you’ve never left
Blossoms falling from a tree
They cover you and cover me
Symbols clashing, bibles smashing
Paint the world you need to see
And sometimes fear is the only place
That we can call our home
Cedarwood Road.

Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

A lot of rappers try approaching the omen
My poems will punish your people while I’m up at the podium
Pharaohs folding ’em, like washed clothes again
I’m a vulture when the flow go choke your kin
Broke, I leave most of them, slow, I keep my motionin’
Eye on the prize
I silence the wise, my lyrics make a scientist cry
Making a secret society expose their purpose
Making ’em unleash info and explode in my surface
I’m taking my time to birth this, rap entity earthless
It’s show time, there’s no time, be ready when the curtain split
I’m hurtin’ shit, too powerful for painkillers
On the concrete jungle we walk like trained guerillas
Untamed, Kane, Kool G, Rakim, combined into one frame
We like the new mecca of immaculate rappers
Vinnie Paz, call the goons, now we back with the clappers.

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project.

You have touched my soul. Souls that have touched can no longer be single souls.

Six o’clock
On the autoroute
Burning rubber, burning chrome
Bay of Cadiz and ferry home
Atlantic sea cut glass
African sun at last
Lights… flash past…
Like memories
A speeding head, a speeding heart
I’m being born, a bleeding start
The engines roar, blood curling wail
Head first then foot
Then heart sets sail

The roar that lies on the other side of silence
The forest fire that is fear so deny it
We are people borne of sound
The songs are in our eyes
Gonna wear them like a crown
Walk out, into the sunburst street
Sing your heart out, sing my heart out
I’ve found grace inside a sound
I found grace, it’s all that I found
And I can breathe
Breathe now.

Winners and losers, turn the pages of my life
There’s saints and sinners
Life’s a gamble and you might lose
There’s cowards and heroes
Both have been known now to break the rules
There’s lovers and haters
The strong and the weak will all have their day
We’re devils and angels
Which one will I be today?
Winners and losers, which one will you be today?
Which one will you be today?
Which one will I be today?

I’m from the school where it’s patriotic to question the motherfuckers at the top.

She said “Time is irrelevant, it’s not linear”
Then she put her tongue in my ear
Every night I have the same dream
I’m hatching some plot, scheming some scheme
Oh yeah
I’m a traffic cop, rue du Marais
The sirens are wailing but it’s me that wants to get away
No line on the horizon
No, no line

Till now swift-circling a white foam arose
From that immortal substance, and a maid Was nourish’d in the midst
The wafting waves First bore her to Cythera’s heaven-blessed coast.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve – the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.

We’ve been traveling on this wavy road
Long time til I be take off this load
But we ride, ride it like a bullet
Outlaws, Makaveli the Don,
Solo, Killuminati, The 7 Days
I see Bloods and Crips runnin’ up the hill
Lookin’ for a better way
My brothers and sisters, it’s time to bail
‘Cause even thug niggas pray
Hopin’ God hear me, I entered the game
Look how much I changed
I’m no longer innocent, casualties of fame
Made a lot of money, seen a lot of places
And I swear I seen a peaceful smile on my mama’s face
When I gave her the keys to her own house, this your land
Your only son done became a man
Watchin’ time fly, I love my people, do or die
But I wonder why we scared to let each other fly
June 1-6, ’71, the day
Mama pushed me out her womb, told me, “Nigga, get paid!”
No one can understand me, the black sheep
Outcasted from my family, now packin’ heat
I run the streets, a young runaway, live for today
When he died, I could hear him say Makaveli the Don puttin’ it down to the fullest
Maximum overload
3 Day Theory, Killuminati to your body
With the impact of a 12 gauge shotty
Double-I slugs, no love

I heard he was light skinned, stocky with a Haitian accent
Jewelry, fast cars and he’s known for flashing (what’s his name)?
Listen while I take you back and lace this rap
A real live tale, about a snitch named Haitian Jack
Knew he was working for the feds, same crime different trail
Picture what he said, and did I mention?
Promised a payback, Jimmy Henchmen, in due time
I knew you was listening, The World is Mine
Set me up, wet me up, niggas stuck me up
Heard the guns bust, but you tricks never shut me up
Touch one of mine on everything I own on earth
I’ll destroy everything you touch, play the game
Last words to a BN why you lie?
Now you gotta watch your back, watch your front
Here we come gunshots to deck, now you stuck
Fuck the rap game This M.O.B
So believe me, we enemies, I go, against all odds

And there’s winners, and there’s losers
But they ain’t no big deal
‘Cause the simple man baby pays the thrills,
The bills and the pills that kill.

Scarecrow on a wooden cross blackbird in the barn Four hundred empty acres that used to be my farm I grew up like my daddy did my grandpa cleared this land When I was five I walked the fence while grandpa held my hand
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow This land fed a nation this land made me proud And son I’m just sorry theres no legacy for you now
The crops we grew last summer weren’t enough to pay the loans Couldn’t buy the seed to plant this spring and the farmers bank foreclosed Called my old friend schepman up to auction off the land He said john its just my job and I hope you understand Hey calling it your job ol hoss sure dont make it right But if you want me to Ill say a prayer for your soul tonight And grandmas on the front porch swing with a Bible in her hand Sometimes I hear her singing take me to the promised land When you take away a mans dignity he cant work his fields and cows.

Hello woman of my dreams
This is not
the way it seems
Purple words
on a grey background
To be a woman
and to be turned down
Old enough now
to change your name
When so many love you
is it the same
It’s the woman in you
that makes you want
to play this game.

The game is life and I play the game.

Heading down south to the land of the pines
I’m thumbing my way into North Caroline
Staring up the road and pray to God I see headlights
I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Picking me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I’m a-hopin’ for Raleigh, I can see my baby tonight
So rock me momma like a wagon wheel
Rock me momma any way you feel
Rock me momma like the wind and the rain
Rock me momma like a south bound train
Hey, momma rock me
I’m running from the cold up in New England
I was born to be a fiddler in an old time string band
My baby plays a guitar, I pick a banjo now
Oh, north country winters keep a-getting me down
Lost my money playing poker so I had to leave town
But I ain’t turning back to living that old life no more.

There’s a small cafe on the outskirts of town
I’ll be there when the sun goes down
Where the roadside bends
And it twists and turns
Every new generation
And I’ll be praying to my higher self
Don’t let me down, keep my feet on the ground
There’s a roadside jam playin’ on the edge of town
In a town called Paradise near the ancient highway
When the train whistle blows
All the sadness that Hank Williams knows
And the river flows
Call them pagan streams and it spins and turns
In a factory in a street called Bread in East Belfast
Where Georgie knows best
What it’s like to be Daniel in the lion’s den
Got so many friends only most of the time
When the grass is high and the rabbit runs
Though it’s talkin’ to you and I
And every new generation comes to pay
The dues of the organ grinder jam
And the grinder’s switch of the sacrifice
Everybody made to be rational with understanding
And I’ll be praying to my higher self
Oh, don’t let me down, keep my feet on the ground.

Well, I heard the hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Were his only audience.

Ever thine.
Ever mine.
Ever ours.

Because the world is round it turns me on
Because the world is round
Because the wind is high it blows my mind
Because the wind is high
Love is old, love is new
Love is all, love is you.

I hit the city and I lost my band
I watched the needle take another man
Gone, gone, the damage done
I sing the song because I love the man
I know that some of you don’t understand
Milk blood to keep from running out
I’ve seen the needle and the damage done
A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie’s like a settin’ sun.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

[…] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

Pushed and pulled apart by the scenes
I can feel the change
Winds of love blow few, and they move through me, and they blow through you
And take you into the night.

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.

Well the ballrooms and smelly bordellos
And dressing rooms filled with parasites
On stage the band has got problems
They’re a bag of nerves on first nights
He ain’t tied down to no home town
Yeah, and he thought he was wreckless
You think he’s bad, he thinks you’re mad
Yeah, and the guitar player gets restless.

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.

Even though your generation is the most diverse in history with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. It’s as old as time. And in a healthy democracy, it doesn’t work. Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fear mongers and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature. But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void.

Voices from the sky say rely on your best friend to pull you through
But even if I wanted to I couldn’t really truly ’cause my only friend is you.

Maybe you’ll get a replacement
There’s plenty like me to be found
Mongrels who ain’t got a penny
Sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground.
I’m going back to my plough.

The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of…

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

Rockets, moon shots
Spend it on the have nots
Money, we make it
Before we see it, you take it

But now the damage’s done
And we’re back out on the run
Fun how ev’rything was roses
When we held on to the guns
Just because you’re winnin’
Don’t mean you’re the lucky ones
Radicals and racists
Don’t point your finger at me
I’m a small town white boy
Just tryin’ to make ends meet
Don’t need your religion Don’t watch that much TV
Just makin’ my livin’ baby Well that’s enough for me.

While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had
With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I’d spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn
By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words were told, our songs were sung
Where we longed for nothin’ and were satisfied
Jokin’ and talkin’ about the world outside
With hungry hearts through the heat and cold
We never much thought we could get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one
As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices they was few so the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split
How many a year has passed and gone?
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I’ve never seen again
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

On the whole, it was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called ‘animal,’ so-called ‘instincts,’ and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in ‘nature.’ Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being’s very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as ‘animal’ as his cruelty. The new comes out of the random.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him. How he jets under his advanced plumes!

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurour and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Canto XIV
Io venni in luogo Donia luce muto;
The stench of wet coal, politicians
. . . . . . . . . . e and. . . . . n, their wrists bound to
their ankles,
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots,
And with them. . . . . . . r,
a scrupulously clean table-napkin
Tucked under his penis,
and. . . . . . . . . . . m
Who disliked colioquial language,
stiff-starched, but soiled, collars
circumscribing his legs,
The pimply and hairy skin
pushing over the collar’s edge,
Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with sh-t,
And behind them. . . . . . f and the financiers
lashing them with steel wires.
And the betrayers of language
. . . . . . n and the press gang
And those who had lied for hire;
the perverts, the perverters of language,
the perverts, who have set money-lust
Before the pleasures of the senses;
howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house,
the clatter of presses,
the blowing of dry dust and stray paper,
fretor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges,
dung, last cess-pool of the universe,
mysterium, acid of sulphur,
the pusillanimous, raging;
plunging jewels in mud,
and howling to find them unstained;
sadic mothers driving their daughters to bed with decrepitude,
sows eating their litters,
and here the placard ΕΙΚΩΝ ΓΗΣ,
and here: THE PERSONNEL CHANGES,
melting like dirty wax,
decayed candles, the bums sinking lower,
faces submerged under hams,
And in the ooze under them,
reversed, foot-palm to foot-palm,
hand-palm to hand-palm, the agents provocateurs
The murderers of Pearse and MacDonagh,
Captain H. the chief torturer;
The petrified turd that was Verres,
bigots, Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria!
black-beetles, burrowing into the sh-t,
The soil a decrepitude, the ooze full of morsels,
lost contours, erosions.
Above the hell-rot
the great arse-hole,
broken with piles,
hanging stalactites,
greasy as sky over Westminster,
the invisible, many English,
the place lacking in interest,
last squalor, utter decrepitude,
the vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk,
waving the Christian symbols,
. . . . . . . . frigging a tin penny whistle,
Flies carrying news, harpies dripping sh-t through the air.
The slough of unamiable liars,
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authori
pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,
obscuring the texts with philology,
hiding them under their persons,
the air without refuge of silence,
the drift of lice, teething,
and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers.
And Invidia,
the corruptio, fretor, fungus,
liquid animals, melted ossifications,
slow rot, fretid combustion,
chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy
. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,
monopolists, obstructors of knowledge.
obstructors of distribution.

Oh now
I feel the wind blow
Well, you can indicate everything you see
Yes, you can indicate everything you see
Oh now
I load a lorry
Well, you can syndicate any boat you row
Yeah, you can syndicate any boat you row
I told you so
All I want is you
Everything has got to be just like you want it to
Because-

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

Sun is down, freezin’ cold. That’s how we already know, winter’s here. My dawg would probably do it for a Louis belt. That’s just all he know, he don’t know nothin’ else I tried to show ’em, yeah. I tried to show ’em, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gone on you with the pick and roll, Young La Flame, he in sicko mode.

skies
Stars shine like eyes
The black night sighs
The moon in silver trees
Falls down in tears
Light of the night
The earth, a purple blaze
Of sapphire haze
In orbit always
While down below the trees
Bathed in cool breeze
Silver starlight breaks down from night
And so we pass on by the crimson eye
Of great god mars
As we travel the universe.

Things work out best for those who make the best of the way things work out.

Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.

Shout out the Williamsboig where my mom hails from
Right next to High Bridge across from Harlem
To the Grand Concourse where my mom and dad met
Before they moved on down to the Upper West
I see you’re still strong after all that’s gone on
Lifelong, we dedicate this song
Just a little something to show some respect
To the city that blends and mends and tests
Since 9-11 we’re still livin’
And lovin’ life we’ve been given
Ain’t nothing gonna take that away from us
We lookin’ pretty and gritty ’cause in the city we trust
Dear New York I know a lot has changed
Two towers down but you’re still in the game
Home to the many, rejecting no-one
Accepting peoples of all places, wherever they’re from
Every morning took the train to High Street station
Doing homework on the train, what a fucked up situation
On the way back up hearing battle tapes
through the underground, underneath the skyscrapes

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Praying like a prey when the fox in action
I smell blood, no time for maxing
Camouflage in the green, my back is arc
Plus you in trouble cause it’s after dark

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not

Time is motion and the hands are fast
Young words are mumbled, they don’t always last
It’s up to us to be sure they understand
Who makes the rules that make people select?
Who is to judge that your ways are correct?
The media as watchdog is absolute shit
The TV telling you what to think.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The Hottest Places in Hell Are Reserved for Those Who in a Period of Moral Crisis Maintain Their Neutrality.

Ain’t no tellin when I’m down for a jack move
Here’s a murder rap to keep yo dancin
with a crime record like Charles Manson
AK-47 is the tool
Don’t make me act the motherfuckin fool
Me you can go toe to toe, no maybe
I’m down with the capital C-P-T
Boy you can’t fuck with me
So when I’m in your neighborhood, you better duck
Cuz Ice Cube is crazy as fuck
As I leave, believe I’m stompin
but when I come back, boy, I’m comin straight outta Compton.

I Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal.

Cinderella, she seems so easy.
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You Belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place my friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row

Every artist is a cannibal
every poet is a thief
all kill for inspiration
and then sing about the grief.

Well I don’t mind stealing bread
From the mouths of decadence
But I can’t feed on the powerless
When my cup’s already overfilled

He fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts.
Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.

I believe in the Kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one

Oh, I miss the kiss of treachery
The shameless kiss of vanity
The soft and the black and the velvety
Up tight against the side of me
And mouth and eyes and heart all bleed
And run in thickening streams of greed
As bit by bit, it starts the need
To just let go, my party piece
Oh, I miss the kiss of treachery
The aching kiss before I feed
The stench of a love for younger meat
And the sound it makes when it cuts in deep
The holding up on bended knees
The addiction of duplicities
As bit by bit, it starts the need
To just let go, my party piece
I never said I would stay to the end
So I leave you with babies and hoping for frequency
Screaming like this in the hope of the secrecy
Screaming me over and over and over
I leave you with photographs, pictures of trickery
Stains on the carpet and stains on the scenery
Songs about happiness, murmured in dreams
And we both of us knew how the ending would be
So it’s all come back round to breaking apart again
Breaking apart like I’m made up of glass again
Making it up behind my back again
Holding my breath for the fear of sleep again
Holding it up behind my head again
Cut in deep, to the heart of bone again
Round and round and round
It’s coming apart again
Over and over and over.

Two trains running side by side, forty miles wide
Down the eastern line
You don’t have to go, I just came to you because you’re a friend of mine.

Flying o’r the sea,
My guitar and me.
Thirty thousand feet,
What a brilliant feat.
Go west, don’t go east,
A famine or a feast.
We’re treated better there,
A homeless one is rare.
I feel,
The city’s lure.
The apple of my eye,
I cherish her.
Everybody’s here,
From all across the earth,
Tongues and tribes galore,
There isn’t any war.
New York, New York, I’m comin’
New York, New York, I’m comin’
New York, New York, I’m comin’
New York, New York, I’m comin

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.

I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well-hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Ain’t no wind that I can feel in the way, in the way
In the freezing rain
Turn your head my way and my heart and look and see
And I look away
Ain’t no wind that I feel, flyin’ with no way to lose
Ain’t no shame to hold you, to hold you here, for losing you.

A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.- L. Frank Baum, ``The Wonderful Wizard of Oz``

What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children, life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until … a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.

You never miss the water til the well runs dry.

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

There are millions of acres of land yet untouched, which if leveed and drained and fenced, and well cultivated, might be made to produce with good luck seven or more bales to the hand. It would cost comparatively little to accomplish it — one lucky crop would repay all the outlay for land and improvements — if it were not for “the hands.” The supply of hands is limited. It does not increase in the ratio of the increase of the cotton demand.

Imitation is always insult–not flattery.

…for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
not the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Watching the moon at dawn, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely, no part left out.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

I can’t breathe.

She wears strength and darkness equally well, the girl has always been half goddess, half hell.

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves

All issues are political issues.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

Our greatest strength comes not from what we possess, but from what we believe; not from what we have, but from who we are.

Eu sou de ninguém
Eu sou de todo mundo
E todo mundo é meu também-

There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilisation.

Que não há caminho para a felicidade, a felicidade é o caminho
There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

Brasil is not for beginners

The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.

Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.

The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me

Seen from an approaching aircraft that is gradually losing altitude, the nighttime illumination of Los Angeles looks like a magical image. Later, on the streets of the city, that same light seems pallid and sickly to me, an unnatural brightness in which the green lawns and bushes in the front yards of the houses look as if they were made of plastic.

The freeway system … is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident. The freeways become a special way of being alive … the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn't do.

Vision without execution is just hallucination.

Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.
Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

If music be the food of love, play on

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

Lots of folks back East, they say, is leavin' home every day
Beatin' the hot old dusty way to the California line
'Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin' out of that old dust bowl
They think they're goin' to a sugar bowl but here's what they find
Now the police at the port of entry say
"You're number fourteen thousand for today"
Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi folks you ain't got the do re mi
Why you better go back to beautiful Texas
Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see
But believe it or not you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi
'Cause I look through the want ads every day
But the headlines on the papers always say
If you ain't got the do re mi boys you ain't got the do re mi
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas
Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see
But believe it or not you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi

The hills speaking softly to brag
The rain is so quiet it's sad
In liberty it rains so loud we can't hear
Its so hard to see outside when it rains down here
The arches hold together St. Louis
And the mighty Mississippi splits right through us
Before my arches rebuild, they must have a song
But I can't proceed until the rain is gone
Blue grey background on those moss green pines
Heavy grown raindrops clinging to the electrical lines
Floating in an atmosphere of truth and hidden lies
Sometimes out here, I feel like my heroes can save my life.

Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.

We're goin' out in the country, get down to the real soul
We're gettin' out to the west coast
Shining our light into the days of bloomin' wonder
Goin' as much with the river as not, as not, yeah, yeah
An' I'm goin' as much with the river as not
Yeah, yeah, right, yeah
Blake and the Eternals oh standin' with the Sisters of Mercy
Looking for the Veedon Fleece, yeah
William Blake and the Eternals oh standin' with the Sisters of Mercy
Looking for the Veedon Fleece, yeah
You don't pull no punches, but you don't push the river
You don't pull no punches, and you don't push the river
You don't pull no punches, and you don't push the river, no, no
Goin' as much with the river as not
We're goin' out in the West, down to the cathedrals
We're goin' out in the West (alright), down to the beaches
And the Sisters of Mercy, behind the sun
Oh behind the sun

I am nothing, but could be everything.

Tristeza não tem fim
Felicidade sim

Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

A Republic if you can keep it.

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...
This is the inter-related structure of reality.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

Sometimes you need a breakdown to get to a breakthrough.

Grace
She carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl
In perfect condition
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things
Grace finds beauty
In everything
Grace finds goodness in everything

To be everywhere is to be nowhere.

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it

I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

There's spirits above and behind me
Faces gone black, eyes burning bright
May their precious blood bind me
Lord, as I stand before your fiery light

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

Maybe I was born too late
For this lonely freedom fight
Maybe I was born in the wrong way
Maybe born on the wrong day

I have heard a storm of words in me, enough to write several hundred songs and that many books. I know that these words I hear are not my own private property. I borrowed them from you, the same as I walked through the high winds and borrowed enough air to keep me moving.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Feel the storm coming on
Feel the darkness at your gate
Live the loneliness of life
Keep on moving at your pace
Ain't the sky just shades of gray
Until you seen it from the other side?
Oh, if loving you's the same

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

Public Policy –

Degrees of Freedom

Juvenal, the Roman poet active in the late first and early second century AD, once stated: … Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses. We are in that widening gyre of costly circus games and other forms of entertainment as a means of gaining electoral political power. In the play on panopticism, power is now communicated outwardly through social media, sometimes overtly, sometime subtly, but always increasingly through digitalized worlds of information. Is digitization causing this vacuum in democracy, and in its stead, are we a displaced, distracted electorate, or can the public turn the panopticon on the circus at the helm, and in turn, improve democratic civic engagement?

Music –

The Bridge

In music, especially western popular music, a bridge is a contrasting section that prepares for the return of the original material section. A bridge, then, is simply a transition from the second chorus to the last chorus. Music is a bridge – a bridge across race, culture, and even a bridge to memory. I became fascinated by the affects of music on the brain when I moderated an evening symposium in 2017 with The Johns Hopkins University, artist Michael Franti, and Professor of Otolaryngology, Dr. Charles Limb, in an effort to unite musicians & physicians under one roof. Recently, research indicates a relationship between music and cognitive functions including heightened creative impulses, memory, executive function, and linguistics, among others. I have a deep desire to contribute to this research, particularly in music and improving neurodegenerative conditions. More importantly, I want to understand the depths of lyric, of chorus, verse, and rhythm, as it takes us to a discursive ocean of sound, beauty, and tranquility, away from the confines of logic, and into the space where, according to Aldous Huxley, after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Medicine and Biotechnology –

Proof of Concept

Here I seek to understand new trends in medicine to treat new expansive therapeutic areas, such as clinical trials using CAR-T in oncology, autoimmune disorders, viral diseases, and even in dermatology. This section also seeks to understand new trends in biotechnology, such as new regulatory requirements in tech transfer, new manufacturing commercial trends, the emergence of synthetic biology, improving real-world data for clinical trials as it relates to market access/pricing, and the rise of venture capital in emerging markets. Finally, I seek to understand not just the business in medicine, but also the medicine in business. How does public health, or population health for that matter, play an integral role in the pharma and biotech industry?

Give ThemBread & Circuses- Julius Caesar

Give ThemBread & Circuses- Julius Caesar

Degrees of Freedom

The Bridge

Proof of Concept

Blog

The Challenges and Advantages of Decentralized Clinical Trials in an era of increasing complexities

The Sermon on the Mount, A Thumbnail Sketch of a Poet’s Life

The Life of One Patient – In memoriam Dr. Paul Edward Farmer

Let’s keep in touch!