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