That existence is scarcely to be termed life, which does not bring us into intimate connexion with our fellow-creatures.

Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on; I never hesitated to use them, when I fought any battle for the miserable and oppressed. People are so afraid to speak, it would seem as if half our fellow-creatures were born with deficient organs; like parrots... See more

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality... what I most regretted were my silences... My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you,” Audre Lorde admonished a generation later

“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men*,” the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote in her 1914 anthem against silence — a line Rachel Carson leaned on in summoning her epoch-making courage to speak inconvenient truth to power as she awakened the modern environmental conscience.