Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
Whether you want it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin a political tone.
your eyes a political color.
...
you walk with political steps
on political ground.
Szymborska, Wisława. "Children of Our Age." Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997. Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.
At the time Thomas was the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In an informal discussion among some of the staff, a white employee was describing the difficulty he had encountered trying to get a bank loan. This quotation illustrates that Thomas has had an antipathy to affirmative action and racial programming or preferences well before he was appointed to the Appellate and later the Supreme Court.
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, which has since become part of Kórnik, she later resided in Kraków until the end of her life. In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors', though she wrote in a poem, "Some Like Poetry" ("Niektórzy lubią poezję"), that "perhaps" two in a thousand people like poetry.
