"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

  • Late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel laureate and anti-apartheid South African leader. He died on 26 December 2021.

"If you're alive, you're afraid. If you're not afraid, then you're not paying attention. The only thing we have to fear is having no fear itself — having no feeling on behalf of whom and what we've lost, whom and what we love."

  • Amanda Gorman, an American poet and the author of "The Hill We Climb" and "Call Us What We Carry" writing last week in a New York Times Guest Essay: "Why I Almost Didn't Read My Poem at the Inauguration."

"We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections."

-Sidney Poitier in "The Measure of a Man- a Spiritual Autobiography". Poitier, a trailblazing Black actor ("To Sir with Love"; "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"; "In the Heat of the Night" died of heart failure and other complications, on 6 January 2022, at 94.

"Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."

-Dr. Martin Luther King, from his 1956 "The Most Durable Power" sermon. The USA observed Dr. Martin Luther King Day on 17 January.

"I have to be the Government's chief opposition when necessary because the one thing I know is that in any way I must not breach the oath of office which I took, and the people of this country must know, the fairness, the value, the accountability that they need, the transparency which they require will always be part and parcel of the functioning of this Government".

-Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, after winning all 30 seats of the Barbados parliament, on 19 January 2022.