Forces Act

Famous quotes containing the words forces and/or act:

    There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.
    Victor Hugo (1802–1885)

    of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
    centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
    and we still have to stare into the absence
    of men who would not, women who could not, speak
    to our life—this still unexcavated hole
    called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)