The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, ‘A civilization is judged only in its decline.’ That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
Imagine
One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I’ll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.
Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.
I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can’t imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.
With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?
Even the ‘Negro’ shows like ‘Amos and Andy’ and ‘Beulah’ are written largely by white writers – the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.
If cars and buses were attacked daily by petrol bombs or stones for 16 months in Washington, could you imagine it would be tolerated? It would not, because in the name of democracy, to preserve democracy, steps would be taken.
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
Imagine – four years you could have spent travelling around Europe meeting people, or going to the Far East of Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted it at Roosevelt.
Sometimes when I speak to groups or I’m interviewed by a journalist, I ask them to imagine their communities without Girl Scouts – to imagine the thousands of food drives and clothing and toy collections that would never take place if not for Girl Scouts.