September 11 Quotes

“I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy… I will never forget seeing what love can heal…”
― Steve Maraboli

“It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Then, one sunny September morning, the illusion of a personal God that I tried so hard to believe in, exploded over the skies of Manhattan. Even as the ashes and ruin of this horrific act of blind faith settled over New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, I watched people across the country scrambling to that same irrational altar for their answers. In the fierce storm of emotion that rolled across this country, one realization rose to the surface of my mind with blinding clarity: certainly this mechanism of unassailable blind faith is one of the greatest risks mankind faces today.”
― Nathan Phelps

“Our grief is not a cry for war.
"That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“When nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11, it was enough to create massive change in our society. Over ten times as many people die from guns each year. Where is the social change?”
― DaShanne Stokes

“thunder and lightning and our world
is another place no day
will ever be the same no blood
untouched”
― Lucille Clifton

“is it treason to remember

what we have done
to deserve such villainy

nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing”
― Lucille Clifton

“It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of “religious violence,” we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence.”
― Jack David Eller, Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History

“It was as if real life had been canceled for the day.”
― Jennifer Weiner, Who Do You Love

“instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?
be kinder. be a little gentler, with yourself and others. take more pictures. tell more jokes. be a better human.
today is a lot more than a tragedy. today is a birthday. a day of suicide awareness. a wedding. a birth. a new job. today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.
be kind. just be kind. it's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. no more mourning. let it just be a sunday.”
― Taylor Rhodes, calloused: a field journal

“and God has blessed America
to learn that noone is exempt
the world is one all fear
is one all life all death
all one”
― Lucille Clifton

“and this is not the time
I think
to ask who is allowed to be
american america
all of us gathered under one flag
praying together safely
warmed by the single love
of the many tongued God”
― Lucille Clifton

“the st. marys river flows
as if nothing has happened

i watch it with my coffee
afraid and sad as are we all

so many ones to hate and i
cursed with long memory

cursed with the desire to understand
have never been good at hating”
― Lucille Clifton

“and i am consumed with love
for all of it

the everydayness of bravery
of hate of fear of tragedy

of death and birth and hope”
― Lucille Clifton

“i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate

i bear witness to no thing
more human than love”
― Lucille Clifton

“The National Institute of Standards and Technology has provided a preliminary estimation that between 16,400 and 18,800 civilians were in the WTC complex as of 8:46 am on September 11. At most 2,152 individual died in the WTC complex who were not 1) fire or police first responders, 2) security or fire safety personnel of the WTC or individual companies, 3) volunteer civilians who ran to the WTC after the planes' impact to help others or, 4) on the two planes that crashed into the Twin Towers. Out of this total number of fatalities, we can account for the workplace location of 2,052 individuals, or 95.35 percent. Of this number, 1,942 or 94.64 percent either worked or were supposed to attend a meeting at or above the respective impact zones of the Twin Towers; only 110, or 5.36 percent of those who died, worked below the impact zone. While a given person's office location at the WTC does not definitively indicate where that individual died that morning or whether he or she could have evacuated, these data strongly suggest that the evacuation was a success for civilians below the impact zone.”
― 9/11 Commission

“In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.

I come without explanations or solutions. I can only tell you what I have seen.

On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.

At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know.

At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.

At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action. That is the nation I know.

This is not mere nostalgia; it is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been -- and what we can be again.”
― George W. Bush

“Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative – the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride – is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the USA got what it deserved, what it had been doing to others for decades) really any better? The predominant reaction of European – but also American – Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the ‘feminist’ point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed (‘castrated’). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding us of Holocaust revisionism (what are the 3,000 dead against millions in Rwanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that the CIA (co-)created the Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument against attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely America’s duty to rid us of the monster it created? The moment we think in the terms of ‘Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism’, the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims. The ethical stance proper is replaced here by the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror, which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“The first of our losses happened on September 11, 2001. Years later, during my freshman year at college, a popular topic of conversation in the dining hall was where you were on 9/11. I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“My former attitude was the luxury of a sheltered child who got to his twenties without ever doubting the stability (and, smugly, I know, the superiority) of his country, without disaster. As it did to so many of my generation, 9/11 broke a stupor that should have broken well before. It seems impossible to me that people who weren't alive then will soon be getting their driver's licenses. When I zoom out, much of this country's history since that day seems a fitful, graceless descent to overseas violence and domestic paranoia. Terrorism works.”
― Amit Majmudar, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now