"Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. And the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship." – A. Philip Randolph 🌱📷

"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience." — Hartley Shawcross, Nuremberg tribunal prosecutor 🌱📷

"You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise." — Maya Angelou 🌱📷

"Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity." — James Baldwin 🌱📷

Moonochrome Moonday. 🌱📷

"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise." — Francis Bacon 🌱📷

"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up you get a lot of scum on the top." — Edward Abbey 🌱📷

"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough." — Franklin D. Roosevelt 🌱📷

"What has brought us up from savagery is a loyalty to truth, and truth cannot emerge unless it is subjected to the utmost scrutiny. Will you not agree that a society which has lost sight of that cannot survive?" — Judge Learned Hand 🌱📷

This is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Never forget. Don't let evil go unchecked. 🌱📷

"It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence." — Upton Sinclair 🌱📷

"In the cold wind, if you can lean against others, none of you will blow away. You keep each other from falling or help each other get back up. Someone holds out a hand — or even scared old you may hold out a hand — and a person in need reaches for it and hangs on.” — Anne Lamott 🌱📷

Since our governor erased Key West's iconic rainbow crosswalks, people here have been painting their picket fences to show LGBTQ solidarity. That violates codes in our Historic District, but art displays are AOK. A local #fencefairy is sprinkling these around town, and I was happy to snag one. 🏳️‍🌈

“Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” — A.A. Milne 🌱📷

"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt." — Mohandas K. Gandhi 🌱📷

Yo, birds! Luncheon is served at the durantas. 🌱📷

"Once a government is committed to silencing the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." — Harry S Truman, Aug. 8, 1950 🌱📷

Winter sunsets don't compare to summer's, but they still have their moments. 🌱📷

Never, never be afraid to do what's right.... Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 🌱📷

I saw the photos of the white guy in tactical stuff getting hassled in Minneapolis (and escorted to safety by a black dude) and assumed he was from ICE or CBP. Turns out he was just a racist right-wing prick in town to stir things up. Huh. Easy mistake.

Monochrome Monday. 🌱📷

I think he came in to get warm. 📷

"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." — Baron de Montesquieu 🌱📷

Doing what it can to generate some heat. 🌱📷

"It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard." — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1742-99 🌱📷

It took an 85-year-old Reagan-appointed judge to shout out the truth that so many have been hiding from: There is a conspiracy at the highest levels of government to sneer at the Constitution and break the law.

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes.... Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated.” — Anne Frank 🌱📷

Finally, a portrait worthy of him.

this is Minnesotan for "I am mad enough to bite through rebar"

"A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later concludes that it isn't enough just to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong." — Lewis H. Lapham 🌱📷

I like my Golden Globes better. 🌱📷

"Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to rationalize. Humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable." — M. Gessen 🌱📷

This is a big deal. St Lucie County went for Trump by 10 percentage points.

Intersectionality. 🌱📷

I’ve long had a theory that if you are an animal whose offspring require a lot of adult attention and care and you are also a very social species that uses sex as a way to form bonds, it makes good sense for individuals to be oriented towards same-sex behavior.

This is a big no-no in armed combat. It’s like dressing up as a doctor or a nurse and then shooting someone. If this is proven accurate, it’s 100% a war crime.

"When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 🌱📷

Monochrome Monday.

"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." — Margaret Atwood 🌱📷

"That we don't learn much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." — Aldous Huxley 🌱📷

Eight legs, seven wheels, three smiles: An afternoon outing in Key West's Old Town. 📷

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead.” — Thomas Paine 🌱📷

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." — Dietrich Bonhöffer 🌱📷

This is long and angry. Both are justified.

#tbt: Digging deep in the archives for this one, a 1956 photo of Chicago Sun-Times photographers. Seven were still there when I arrived 11 years later (eventually on the photo desk a while), including little Louis Giampa (L) and big Joe Kordick (R). All had traded their Speed Graphics for Nikons. 📷

"My eyes and my mind keep taking me where my old legs can't keep up." — Happy birthday, Zora Neale Hurston 🌱📷

"Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others." — Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, 1839–1908) 🌱📷

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them." — Umberto Eco 🌱📷

Monochrome Monday.

"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead." — Arundhati Roy 🌱📷