Irene Levine Paull Quotes

Greed and hypocrisy are indeed inseparable companions. ("To a Young Girl Graduate")

The ones we love are like lighted candles in our being. When one goes out, it leaves a part of us in darkness. I have a duty to perform, grappling with the darkness where once you used to be-a duty to you and to all youth like you born into a world of poverty and depression and war, a world which seems to have no present and no future. I have a monument to build to your memory...a better society where youth can blossom to its rich fulfillment. Goodbye, little sister! Thousands of crushed and broken youth lie like you in their needless graves, youth who had no present, and saw no future. But millions of us have set our teeth against the wind. The working class is moving toward a happier world where its beloved children will not be gnarled and twisted and broken, but will grow straight as the young trees straining towards the sun. ("She who Died Without Living")

Uneasy is the head that wears a crown. ("Justice in Connor's Kingdom")

The time was the era shortly after the First World War when waves of post-war immigration carried to the new world like rotting bilge water all the bitter hatreds, prejudices and venoms of Tsarist Russia and Poland.

History itself is the only arbiter of "dangerous thoughts" and to whom they are dangerous. For the world does move. Men's thoughts change as the times change. You can no more freeze the thoughts of mankind than you can stop the earth from moving on its axis, than you can freeze a lovely face into eternal youth. To try to do this is not only to make a mockery of democracy, it is to stop the movement of progress and to whip up a fierce tide of reaction. Who should have the right to determine that another man's thoughts are "dangerous"? ("Jailed for her Thoughts")

Hatred springs from uncertainty and fear.

Woe to our memory if it can be said by unhappy future generations that we defeated Hitler and Mussolini, only to lay down arms to the Hoovers, the Vandenbergs, the Wheelers, Hearsts, Knutsons, and McCormicks of America. If we allow Germany to be built up again as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, if we permit American cooperation to be transformed into American imperialism-woe to our memory if we allow the seeds of a third world war to be planted under our victorious feet!