“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.”— Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov
“Now, if you’re one of the 30 million Americans who don’t yet have health insurance, starting in 2014 this law will offer you an array of quality, affordable, private health insurance plans to choose from. Each state will take the lead in designing their own menu of options, and if states can come up…”— Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov
“Look at the faces here around you, and you see an America that is more fair and more free and more just than the one Dr. King addressed that day. We are right to savor that slow but certain progress -– progress that’s expressed itself in a million ways, large and small, across this nation every sing…”— Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov
“We’re the worst terrorists in the world and it was a long time coming. This entire country was built on the slaughter of innocents.”— Anonymous, facebook.com
“Gérard spends his days thinking about the many reasons he hates America that include but are not limited to the people, the weather, having to drive everywhere and having to go to school every day.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“The American flag is the most exquisite and artistic of all the banners of all the nations.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel, amazon.com
“America, we need more cities organized like those in Europe. Sorry, BP, you (and your profits) can suck an egg.”— Kristin Addis, thoughtcatalog.com
“The reason America is such a horror story is that the entire thing is built on an Old Indian Graveyard.”— Frankie Boyle, stopwar.org.uk
“To be black in America is to exist in haunting, mundane proximity to death at all moments.”— Hannah Giorgis, buzzfeed.com
“If I go outside and try to hail a cab and he passes me for the white woman standing right there, that racism is still alive and kicking. And we have to change that. And I'm not blaming the white lady, she needed a cab too.”— Queen Latifah, billboard.com
“It is up to us to take a stand and demand that they ‘stop killing us,' We’re going to stand up as a community and fight against anyone who believes that murder or any violent action by those who are sworn to protect us should consistently go unpunished.”— Beyoncé Knowles, beyonce.com
“The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it ‘ominous’ when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don’t we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we’re going to hav…”— James Baldwin, amazon.com
“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only…”— Ta-Nehisi Coates, theatlantic.com
“Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life.”— Redditt Hudson, vox.com
“Fiction can remind us — and because of the blood-sport nature of politics, we constantly need reminding — that the players in politics are first human beings.”— John Williams, nytimes.com
“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil -- black gold! -- ghettoizin…”— Jesse Williams, billboard.com
“If you have a critique for our resistance then you’d better have an established record, a critique of our oppression.”— Jesse Williams, billboard.com
“Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we’re going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.”— Jesse Williams, billboard.com
“American media and politicians love pinning the blame on the whole muslim population so that they do not have to feel like part of the problem and because this, once again, is apparently a matter of religion so that they don't have to reexamine their own views on gun control or homophobia.”— Anonymous, a6.tumblr.com
“It seems like the better it gets, the more miserable people become. There’s never a technological advancement where people think, ‘Wow, we can finally do this!’ … And I think a lot of it has to do with advertising. Americans have it constantly drilled into our heads, every fucking day, that we deser…”— Eric Spitznagel, vanityfair.com