Quotes For You

This path will be easier and shorter for all of us if we take it by mutual efforts and in close rank. If there are thousands of us, they will not be able to do anything with us. If there are tens of thousands of us, then we would not even recognize our country. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny. -Eric Hoffer

And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul- don't let him be proud of his "progressive" views, and don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist, a merited figure, or a general--let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and warm. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live. -Bertrand Russell

Things have almost reached rock bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children--but as before we still smile in a cowardly way and mumble without tongues tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven't the strength? -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to the path which nature has marked out for him. -Goethe

What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! -Patrick Henry

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. -Betty Friedan, Feminist, author

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful. -Leo Tolstoy, author (1828-1910)

Where there is great love, there are always miracles. -Willa Cather

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. -Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer. -Gloria Steinem

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom. -Thomas Jefferson

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws. -John Adams, 2nd US president (1735-1826)

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law. --From Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which the US, Britain and Israel are signatories.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework – an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. -Betty Friedan, Feminist, author

A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us... must be subjected to a large degree of social control... The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order. -Willard Givens, future NEA Exec. Secretary in 1935 in a report presented at the 72nd annual NEA meeting.

I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation. ...I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. ... I had no knowledge of these attacks. -Osama Bin Laden 9/16/2001 (authentic Bin Laden statement)

Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill. -Betty Friedan, Feminist, author

I have already said that I am not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. -Osama Bin Laden 9/28/2001 in the Daily Ummat - a Pakistani Newspaper Interview

It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all. -Betty Friedan

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose? -Don Marquis (1878 - 1937)

The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose/lose situation. If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see there is simply no escape. -Martin van Creveld, Israeli military historian

We should take care, in inculcating patriotism into our boys and girls, that is a patriotism above the narrow sentiment which usually stops at one's country, and thus inspires jealousy and enmity in dealing with others... -Lord Robert Baden-Powell

The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been. -Frank Lloyd Wright

[The Post-Dispatch will ] never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty. -Joseph Pulitzer, April 10, 1907, upon his retirement

The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time. -Abraham Lincoln

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future. -Alex Haley (author of Roots)

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile. - Albert Einstein

The truth will make you free, but first it will make you miserable. - Tom DeMarco

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. -Gore Vidal, writer (1925- )

Behold. We have bestowed upon thee good in abundance. Hence pray unto thy Sustainer and sacrifice [unto Him alone] Verily, he that hates thee has indeed been cut off [from all that is good]! - The Abundance, Chapter 108 from the Qur'an

In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong; honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes. - John Ruskin (1819-1900) English Art Critic

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it. -Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. -Ralph W. Sockman

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth. - Jean de La Bruyere

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. -Margaret Fuller

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. --Stephen Jay Gould

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is atonce useless and afflictive... that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present. -Samuel Johnson (The Idler)

Of all the somber ironies of history none throws a more sinister light on human nature than the fact that the new-style nationalist Jews, on the morrow of the most appalling... persecution that their race had endured, should at once proceed to demonstrate, at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs...the crime of which they themselves had been the victims...to persecute, in their turn, a people weaker than they were. - Arnold Joseph Toynbee. "A Study of History." Page 177, Oxford U Press, New York 1957

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. - Albert Schweitzer

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. - Edmund Burke

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development. -Felix Adler

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee. -Marian Wright Edelman

If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day. -Alex Noble

A king can stand people fighting but he can't last long if people start thinking. - Will Rogers, (1879-1935)

To initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. -Nuremberg Tribunal

My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear? -Paul Robeson (1898-1976) - from testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, June 12, 1956

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. -Gore Vidal

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him. -Honore De Balzac (1799-1850) French Novelist

I believe with all my heart that civilization has produced nothing finer than a man or woman who thinks and practices true tolerance. - Frank Knox

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind. - Voltaire

..when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings. -Sogyal Rinpoche

The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love. -William Wordsworth

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development. -Felix Adler, Psychologist

Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name – the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole. -Vaclav Havel, Czech politician, philosopher

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. -Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi, theologian, activist

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality. -Martin Luther King Jr.

The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty and truth. -Albert Einstein

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these. - George Washington Carver

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom--they are the pillars of society. -Henrik Ibsen

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. - Aldous Huxley

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is: "Let there be truth between us two forevermore." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth never damages a cause that is just. - Mohandas K. Gandhi "Non-Violence in Peace and War"

Truth is the glue that holds government together. -- Gerald R. Ford, Speech, 9 Aug. 1974, on succeeding Richard Nixon as president.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. - Winston Churchill

A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds, in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends. - Caryl P. Haskins, Scientist & Author

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. - Matthew Arnold "Sohrab and Rustum"

When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes not oppressive; the rational world is my friend because I am friend of its happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government. -Thomas Paine

Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival. - Rene Dubois, Celebrations of Life, 1981

What will our children remember of us, ten, fifteen years from now? The mobile we bought or didn't buy? Or the tone in our voices, the look in our eyes, the enthusiasm for life - and for them - that we felt? They, and we, will remember the spirit of things, not the letter. Those memories will go so deep that no one could measure it, capture it, bronze it, or put it in a scrapbook. -Sonia Taitz

Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population. -Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana

I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy. -Anthony Robbins

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. -Albert Einstein

Living in the moment means letting go of the past and not waiting for the future. It means living your life consciously, aware that each moment you breathe is a gift. -Oprah Winfrey

It's easy to carry the past as a burden instead of a school. It's easy to let it overwhelm you instead of educate you. - Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine, Feb. 18, 2003)

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe--though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now because it's in the past, because we have survived. -Susan Sontag

It is the rare person who, looking back over his life and seeing what he has done to it, hasn't sighed for a chance to redeem what he has cheaply used or carelessly ruined. If only somehow, somewhere, there was a way to live again the days we have darkened with our blind haste - the innumerable occasions when our indifference trod on all the pearls of God's graciousness; the times when our pride, or our fear, or our meanness poured the acid of contempt over the fair countenance of another's soul! If this grace were ours, how we would leap to the chance! -Samuel Howard Miller (The Life of the Soul)

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. -Anais Ninn

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system. -William James

You are a child of the Universe, no less than the moon and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should. - Max Ehrmann, American philosopher

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. - Benito Mussolini

As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints. -Charles Caleb Colton

The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses. -Ed Crane, one of the 85 founders of the Libertarian Party

What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature. -Voltaire

Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose. -Immanuel Kant, Prussian Philosopher (1724-1804)

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. -William James

Life is eternal, Love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. -Rossiter W. Raymond

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower is to bloom. -Alice Walker, Author of The Color Purple

Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade. -Constance Baker Motley

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. -Louisa May Alcott, Author of "Little Women"

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. -Martha Washington, First Lady

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road, the one "less traveled by", offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. - Rachel Carson, Environmentalist

Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. -Susan B. Anthony, Abolitionist, Suffragist

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place. -Margaret Mead, Anthropologist

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Willpower is the key to success. Successful people strive no matter what they feel by applying their will to overcome apathy, doubt or fear. -Dan Millman

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings. -Dorothy Thompson

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. -Henry James

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. -Marianne Williamson

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. -Eleanor Roosevelt

People living deeply have no fear of death. -Anais Nin

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive -- the risk to be alive and express what we really are. -Don Miguel Ruiz

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age. - Friedrich Nietzsche

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have. -John Locke

To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages: and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers or both. -Elizabeth Charles, poet

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes...known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. -James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life. - Victor Frankl, Psychoanalyst & Concentration Camp Survivor

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. -Abraham Lincoln

Teach our children to have faith in humanity and to know the dignity of all human beings. Reaffirm America's basic belief that all people are created equal - that we all are children of the Universe. There is no nonsense about that – it is universally obvious and fundamentally American. -Everett Woodman's short speech at Dartmouth July 4th

It is the rare person who, looking back over his life and seeing what he has done to it, hasn't sighed for a chance to redeem what he has cheaply used or carelessly ruined. If only somehow, somewhere, there was a way to live again the days we have darkened with our blind haste - the innumerable occasions when our indifference trod on all the pearls of God’s graciousness; the times when our pride, or our fear, or our meanness poured the acid of contempt over the fair countenance of another's soul! If this grace were ours, how we would leap to the chance! -Samuel Howard Miller, "The Life of the Soul"

Our patriotism should be of the wider, nobler kind which recognizes justice and reasonableness in the claims of others and which lead our country into comradeship with... the other nations of the world. The first step to this end is to develop peace and goodwill within our borders, by training our youth of both sexes to its practice as their habit of life, so that the jealousies of town against town, class against class and sect against sect no longer exist; and then to extend this good feeling beyond our frontiers towards our neighbors. -Lord Robert Baden-Powell

If you can dream it, you can do it. - Walt Disney

Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. - Captain Jean Luc Picard

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. -Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Russian novelist & philosopher

One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one's life has meaning, that one is needed in this world. -Hannah Senesh

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how." -Victor Frankl, Psychoanalyst & Concentration Camp Survivor

Many are they who are touched at the heart by these things. Those they sent forth they knew; now in place of the young men urns and ashes are carried home to the houses of the fighters.... The citizens speak: their voice is dull with hatred. The curse of the people must be paid for. -Agamemnon (432-436, 456-7, Grene and Lattimore)

How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take? -Adin Ballou, The Non-Resistant, 5 February 1845

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life. -Paul Tillich

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us. -Thich Nhat Hanh - Vietnamese monk, activist and writer

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. - Victor Frankl, Psychoanalyst & Concentration Camp Survivor