Parker Palmer Quotes

Look, just go sit at the card table with the rest of the kids and let the adults run the country.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

For if from the vantage point of a particular class the totality of existing society is not visible; if a class thinks the thoughts imputable to it and which bear upon its interests right through to their logical conclusion and yet fails to strike at the heart of that totality, then such a class is doomed to play only a subordinate role.

We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.

The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.

We pride ourselves on our democracy, but when you see the way it actually works, I think it is worthy of contempt.

When you accept the way things are, there's really no other way to operate than the way you've been conditioned to. You live in America: you're free to vote, you go vote, and you continue to see the problems of being a nationalistic society. You don't really know what to do because you're conditioned to feel that's just the way things are.

The weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community. In a republic like ours the governing class is composed of the strong men who take the trouble to do the work of government; and if you are too timid or too fastidious or too careless to do your part in this work, then you forfeit your right to be considered one of the governing and you become one of the governed insteadone of the driven cattle of the political arena.

It is in keeping with their dignity as persons that human being should take an active part in government.

The essential objection to democracy is that, with few exceptions, it imposes degrading acts and attitudes upon the men responsible for the welfare and dignity of the state.

At what point do the oppressed become the oppressors?

The ignorant classes had been taught to believe that certain words such as "sovereignty," "protection," and so forth had peculiar meanings disastrous to their welfare and significant of future political domination, like that from which they had been recently freed.

America is a country which produces citizens who will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote.

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—-though naturally to differing extents-—responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

If you give up on politics, you give up on democracy … and then we are absolute plutocracy.

… as long as men, even socialist men, even the best men in the world, make laws these will be to their advantage and to our disadvantage.

We mean by "politics" the people's business -- the most important business there is.

Sadly, the pernicious ironies of privilege talk are generally lost on those who claim to be most aware of privilege.

I'm just an American citizen like everyone else and I'm not sitting at the power table in the room where it all happens.

One thing that's consistent in all of my work is that these aren't accidents; they're all conscious landscapes. They're all things that we're doing and that we have done through our legal and social systems and structures of capitalism.

Everybody wants to talk about black and white, when the situation is really about rich people against poor people.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.

Since 1990, we have been building up the idea that democracy is the best way for sectors that feel socially excluded from politics to win power.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

There's a great feeling of powerlessness in America. When I express ideas to people, they say, 'That's terrific, but do you think it really counts?'