Tonight I finally acquainted myself with this great American. His legacy shouldn't be forgotten and I hope to raise awareness of his life (1924-1987). "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." "Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return." "All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up." "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." "The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat."
