I've learned to rely on the strength I inherited from all those who came before me-the grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and brothers who were tested with unimaginable hardships and still survived. 'I go forth alone, and stand as ten thousand,' Maya Angelou proclaimed in her poem 'Our Grandmothers.' When I move through the world, I bring all my history with me-all the people who paved the way for me are part of who I am.
The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration.
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.