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All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
By Alexis De Tocqueville
Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.
By Marcus Tullius Cicero
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -how passionately I hate them!
By Albert Einstein
In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."
By Albert Camus
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
By H. L. Mencken
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
By Emma Goldman
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
By George Bernard Shaw
Religion is What Keeps the Poor from Murdering the Rich"
By Napoleon Bonaparte
The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away."
By Immanuel Kant
The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses."
By Utah Phillips
The strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.
By Thucydides
There are some whose only reason for inciting war is to use it as a means to exercise their tyranny over their subjects more easily. For in times of peace the authority of the assembly, the dignity of the magistrates, the force of the laws stand in the way to some extent of the ruler doing what he likes. But once war is declared then the whole business of state is subject to the will of a few ... They demand as much money as they like. Why say more?"
By Erasmus Of Rotterdam
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves"
By Leo Tolstoy
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
By Bill Vaughan
...it is more difficult to live for a cause than to die for it.
By Hans Selye
In research, we soon learn that abstractions are often just as, or even more, effective than tangible individual facts.
By Hans Selye
Looking at something infinitely greater than our conscious selves makes all our daily troubles appear to shrink by comparison. THere is an equanimity and a peace of mind which can be achieved only through contact with the sublime.
By Hans Selye
The true scientist thrives on curiosity; he could not live without it.
By Hans Selye
To make a great dream come true, the first requirement is a great capacity to dream; the second is persistence-- continued faith in the dream.
By Hans Selye
...if the task is important enough, lack of precedent makes the challenge only more alluring.
By Hans Selye
...in real life scientists are full of imperfections that are tactfully eliminated from their obituaries and sometimes even from their biographies.
...If the story is to be honest, then the ugly must not be withheld.
Besides, how do we know that success in some spheres does not depend upon certain defects and even deformities. Qusimodo, in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, was one of literature's ugliest monsters. And yet, his twisted grotesque fram hid a sould capable of infinite pity and love.
By Hans Selye
...it is not the decibels of applause that count, but what you are applauded for and by whom.
By Hans Selye
...to the Scientist, even the ugliest truth is more beautiful than the loveliest pretense.
By Hans Selye
..a great deal of faith is needed for perseverance, because th farther we reach out from the commonplace into the unknown the more inaccessible our aim-- and the less understanding and support we can expect from others.
By Hans Selye
A secret of NATURE, once revealed, permanently enriches humanity as a whole.
By Hans Selye
Busy people have no time to worry even about major setbacks; the inactive fret themselves to while the time away.
By Hans Selye
Egotism is the most characteristic, the most ancient, and the most essential property of life. All living beings, from the simplest amoeba to man, are of necessity closest to themselves and themost natural protectors of their own interests. ...Selfishness is natureal, yet it is ugly; we are so much repulsed by it that we try to deny its existence in ourselves. It is also dangerous to society. ...To me, even altruism is a modified form of egotism, a kind of collective selfishness that helps the community. Unconsciously, we sense that altruism engenders gratitude. By awakening in another person the wish that we should prosper because of what we have done for him, we elicit gratitude which is perhaps the most characteristically human way of assuring our security (homeostasis). It takes away the motive for a clash between selfish and selfless tendencies. By inspiring the feeling of gratitude, we induce others to share with us our natural wish for our own well being.
By Hans Selye
Every scientific discovery reveals new harmonies in the lawfulness of Nature for our passive enjoyment. But research is not a mere "spectator sport," the scientist actively participates in the unveiling of the enjoyable, and this tipe of activity is as close as the human mind can come to the process of creation.
By Hans Selye
In general, original thinkers are especially sensitive to dullness, and resents being constantly grounded by the need to check its bearing through meticulous measurement. In fact, it has often been said that one of the most characteristic features of the exceptional genius is the rare combination of bold imagination with meticulous attention to detail in the objective verification of ideas.
By Hans Selye
In order to be useful in science, imagination must be combined with a keen sense for what is important.
By Hans Selye
Intuition is the unconscious intelligence that leads to knowledge without reasoning or inferring. It is an immediate apprehension or cognition without rational thought. Intuition is the spark for all forms of originality, inventiveness and ingenuity. It It is the flash needed to connect conscious through with imagination. ...imagination is the unconscious power to mix facts in novel ways; while intuition is the gift of bringing usable dream-pictures into consciousness.
Creation itself is always unconscious; only the verification and exploitation of its products lend themselves to conscious analysis. INstinct creates thoughts, without knowing how to think; intellects knows how to use thoughts, but cannot create them.
By Hans Selye
Many more people can face failure than success. Adversity may even ennoble a man by bringing out the best in him, while fame degrades all but the greatest to the state of conceited authority symbols or, at best, reduces them to benigh patrons of the fameless.
Just as the work of talend leads to fame, so does fame lead talent away from work.
...Success also stultifies by the adulation it creates. Through fame the person becomes a personage. ...Then the personage becomes an oracle...
Thus, inexorably, fame kills the real person by petrifying the man into a monument of his own past accomplishments. ...it may take as much energy to fight the consequences of fame as it took to do the work that made him famous.
By Hans Selye
Pleasures are always impractical; they can lead us to no reward. They are the reward.
By Hans Selye
The farther you advance into the unknown, the fewer fellow travelers reain with you. In the forefront of your advance, if it is really beyond the point that anyone else has reached, you are finally alone.
By Hans Selye
The greater they are, the smaller the number of people whose recognition means something to them.
By Hans Selye
The more manifestly sensible and practical a research project, the closer it is to the commonplace we already know. THus, paradoxically, knowledge about the seemingly most farfetched, impractical phenomena may prove the likeliest to yield novel basic information and to lead us to new heights of discovery. But usually this takes time, often much time. Basic research neither becomes nor ceases to be useful as soon as the applied kind.
By Hans Selye
The specialist loses perspective, and by now I am sure that there will always be a need for integrators, for naturalists who keep trying to survey the broad fields. I am no longer worried about missing some of the details. There must remain a few of us who train men and perfect tools to scan the horizons rather than to look ever closer at the infinitely small.
By Hans Selye
In software development, it's great to find open source "widgets." Quotations are like widgets for wisdom.
By Rob Kall
a happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers
By Robert Quillen
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that "talent" to the dark place where it leads.
By Erica Jong
Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.
By Taul Tillich
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
By George Orwell
Poverty is not the absence of goods, but rather the overabundance of desire.
By Plato
The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, he is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, he works not by choice but by compulsion, the more he is then the object of quantitative time. . . . The less alive a person is – “alive” here defined as having conscious direction of his life – the more is time for him the time of the clock. The more alive he is, the more he lives by qualitative time.
By Rollo May
Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.
By Leonardo Da Vinci
Worse than war is fear of war
By Seneca
My father was a writer. You would've liked him. He used to say that artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.
By Evey Hammond
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, sh*t detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
By Ernest Hemingway
Health, Learning and Virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem, and public honor.
By Thomas Jefferson
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.
By John F. Kennedy
Fox is right wing talk radio on television,
By Bill Press
So many things are inappropriate about the Bush Cheney administration.
By Nancy Pelosi
We've watered the leaves. We've not watered the roots.
By Rev. Jesse Jackson
The heart of free trade must be fair trade.
By Rev. Jesse Jackson
Now all the criminals in their suits and ties are free to drink martinis and watch the sunrise
By Bob Dylan
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
By Nicola Tesla
....it is with my body that I love the fields.
As we walk we enter the magnetic fields of other bodies, and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see; and a being leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate, When you and I come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling energies, slowly circling smells.
By Robert Bly
....we can exchange sparks of light with another's eyes when we meet our lover on the dance floor at someone else's wedding.
Our brains then go about warmed and fiery, and with one note they can explode into cello concertos and can imagine the giant blinking at the top of the bean stalk... His barbarous fingers scratching his head.
By Robert Bly
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.
By Robert Bly
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
Caught on this earth, visit
The old man alone in his hut?
By Robert Bly
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have
Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies
Are left over from some larger party.
By Robert Bly
Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
By Robert Bly
Each seed throws itself out down before the dawn,
And the night opens itself out behind it,
And inside its own center it lives!
By Robert Bly
Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.
By Robert Bly
I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon."
By Robert Bly
I have wandered in a face, for hours . . ."
By Robert Bly
I love you with what in me is unfinished.
I love you with what in me is still
Changing, what has no head or arms
Or legs, what has not found its body.
By Robert Bly
I want nothing from You but to see You
By Robert Bly
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions."
By Robert Bly
Its all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
By Robert Bly
So the space between two people diminishes; it grows less and less; no one to weep; they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the other's body, and beings unknown to us start out on a pilgrimage to their Savior, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small balck stone that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door.
By Robert Bly
Some men live with an invisible limp,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons are often angry.
By Robert Bly
The candle is not lit
To give light, but to testify to the night.
By Robert Bly
The deeper question about remedies is not whether ancient religious forms can reform and thus provide these remedies, but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge that cohere with a modern evolutionary/ecological worldview, and could provide a basis for environmental concern and action ... I believe there is strong evidence that such religion is emerging and gathering strength.
By Robert Bly
The walnut of my brain glows. I feel it irradiate the skull. I am aware of the consciousness I have, and I mourn the consciousness I do not have.
By Robert Bly
This body longs for itself far out at sea, it floats in the black heavens, it is a brilliant being, locked in the prison of human dullness....
By Robert Bly
We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
By Robert Bly
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching."
By Robert Bly
When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?
Water that once could take no human weight--
We were students then-- holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.
By Robert Bly
Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.
By Robert Bly
Who is this in me who loves you so?
It must be four fiery men;
They make up a man who loves you.
By Robert Bly
You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling
With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see.
By Robert Bly
Amusement that is excessive and pursued only for its own sake allures and deceives us, and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the grave
By Blaise Pascal
Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us through a pleasant road to our lives end.
By La Rochefoucauld
It is generally the fate of a double dealer, to lose his power and keep his enemies.
By Samuel Johnson
Men are oftner treacherous out of weakness than out of any formed design."
By La Rochefoucauld
Men often do good, that they may be able to do ill with impunity."
By La Rochefoucauld
The danger that is open and honorable, intrepidity may face, and will in the end vanquish. But the ruffian, who stabs in the dark, men of courage and virtue are unprepared to resist: They are ignorant of his arts, and unsuspicious of his purposes, and they too often perish by the blow.
By Sallust
'Tis as easy to deceive one's self without perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without being perceived."
By La Rochefoucauld
... never are we so easily deceived, as when we are contriving how to deceive others."
By La Rochefoucauld
..unless by force of eloquence they mean the force of truth, for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent."
By Plato
A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
By Aldous Huxley
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
By William Blake
All warfare is based on deception.
By Sun Tzu
But to see him in that way, how shall I be able to judge of his character? I shall merely see his outward appearance, look and mien; but as to the rest, Isabella, what trust can I put in it? These flattering mirrors reflect imperfectly what is within; the appearance is often a gay deceiver; what defects of mind lie hidden under its beauty!
And what fair exteriors conceal base souls! The eyes, no doubt, in this important choice of a husband, must be the first to act; but to trust everything to them is to put everything to hazard: he who wishes to live at ease ought not to displease them, but without being a slave, he ought to reckon it enough to give them satisfaction, to yield if they object, but not assent if they agree, and to allow the fire of love to be lighted up from other causes. This chain, which lasts as long as our life, and ought to excite more fear than envy, if we do not take care, often joins opposite to opposite, and the dead to the living: and for myself, since it is necessary that it give me a master, before accepting him I should like to know him, but to know him in his inmost soul.
By Corneille
Do not consider a thing as proof because you find it written in books; for just as a liar will deceive with his tongue, he will not be deterred from doing the same thing with his pen. They are utter fools who accept a thing as convincing proof simply because it is in writing.
By Maimonides
Every protective self deception is a crevice in our psyche with a little demon lurking in it, ready to become an episode of unexplained anxiety when life threatens. The self deceptions which are designed to protect us from pain actually end up delivering more pain. We fortify our deceptions to protect them from the natural corrections of daily life."
By Roger Gould
Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not."
By E.R. Beadle
He always succeeded in his deceptions, as he knew well this aspect of things."
By Niccolo Machiavelli
He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second time.
By Thomas Jefferson
How to make an imaginary animal appear natural.
It is evident that it will be impossible to invent any animal without giving it members, and these members must individually resemble those of some known animal.
If you wish, therefore, to make a chimera, or imaginary animal appear natural (let us suppose a serpent); take the head of a mastiff, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a porcupine, the mouth of a hare, the brows of a lion, the temples of an old cock, and the neck of a sea tortoise."
By Leonardo DaVinci
Ill fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not."
By Ben Jonson
In all business of state there is always a pretext which is put forward, and a real reason which is kept in the background."
By Voltaire
It is better to be deceived by one's friends than to deceive them.
By Goethe
It is doubly pleasing to trick the trickster.
It is doubly pleasing to deceive the deceiver.
By Jean De La Fontaine
It is more dishonourable to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them."
By La Rochefoucauld
Love brings to light the noble and hidden qualities of a lover-- his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal character.
By Nietzsche
Man is but a being filled with error... The senses deceive reason by false appearances; and just as they cheat reason they are cheated by her in turn: she has her revenge. Passions of the soul trouble the senses, and give them false impressions. They emulously lie and deceive each other.
By Pascal
Men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived."
By Niccolo Machiavelli
Men are very apt to deceive themselves in generals, less so than in particulars"
By Macchiavelli
Nature often deceives us, and does not bow to her own laws.
By Pascal
No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.
Lincoln, Abraham {{1809-1864
By Aldous Huxley
No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.
By Greville
Our intention of never deceiving any body exposes us to be often deceived."
By La Rochefoucauld
Since relationships are created by the dayto day process of "sharing reality, we cannot have a relationship built upon lies, even benevolent ones. The chance of deception becomes always possible as the basis for all future interaction. Your real self... becomes permanently violated and all future interrelatedness assumes the possibility of a series of lies. Security in relating vanishes. Only the truth can help us feel secure... can bring us the necessary trust for long lasting relationships... can create a safe environment of unity and growth."
By Leo Buscaglia
The easiest person to deceive is one's own self.
By Bullwer Lytton
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
By Bible
The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.
By Aristotle
There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which the two smiles meet.
By William Blake
There is nothing more apt to deceive us than our own judgement, in deciding on our own works; and we should derive more advantage from having our faults pointed out by our enemies, than by hearing the opinions of our friends, because they are too much like ourselves, and may deceive us as much as our own judgement."
By Leonardo DaVinci
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
By Benjamin Franklin
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.
By Johnson
We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more. A straw or feather sustains itself long in the air.
By Madame Swetchine
We must distinguish between speaking with intent to Deceive and keeping silence with intent to be inscrutable."
By Voltaire
We must make a difference between speaking to deceive and being silent to be impenetrable.
By Voltaire
We're all hypocrites in one form or another.
By Marlon Brando
Who has deceived thee so oft as thyself?"
By Benjamin Franklin
Whoever flatters himself that he can retain in his memory all the effects of nature, is deceived, for our memory is not so capacious: therefore consult nature for everything."
By Leonardo DaVinci
Without enthusiasm, the adventurer couldnever kindle that fire in his followers which is so necessary to consolidate their mutual interests; for no one can heartily deceive numbers who is not first of all deceived himself.
By Warburton
...[he] was as much enchanted by the rudiments of algebra as he would have been if I had given him an engine worked by steam, with a methylated spirit lamp to heat the boiler; more enchanted, perhapsfor the engine would have got broken, and, remaining always itself, would in any case have lost its charm, while the rudiments of algebra continued to grow and blossom in his mind with an unfailing luxuriance. Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful; the new toy was inexhaustible in its potentialities.
By Aldous Huxley
Each man's memory is his private literature.
By Aldous Huxley
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify
himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life
full, significant, and interesting.
By Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him.
By Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
By Aldous Huxley
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
By Aldous Huxley
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay-- in solid cash-- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
By Aldous Huxley
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
By Aldous Huxley
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
By Aldous Huxley
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay-- in solid cash-- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
By Aldous Huxley
Religion is, among many other things, a system of education, by means of which human beings may train themselves, first to make desirable changes in their own personalities and, at one remove, in society, and, in the second place, to heighten consciousness and so establish more adequate relations between themselves".
By Aldous Huxley
Success-- "the bitch goddess success," in william James' phrase-- demands strange sacrifices from those who worship her.
By Aldous Huxley
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards.
By Aldous Huxley
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
By Aldous Huxley
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. --
By Aldous Huxley
I can sympathize with people's pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
Huxley, Aldous
PATRONS, GRANTS, FOUNDATIONS
By Aldous Huxley
I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.
By Aldous Huxley
I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.
If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.
By Aldous Huxley
In life, man proposes, God disposes.
By Aldous Huxley
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
.
By Aldous Huxley
A man can only see by his own lamp; but he can walk in the light of other men's.
By Joseph Joubert
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."
By Bacon
As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so life with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
By Helen Keller
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
By Cecil Beaton
But he who beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
By William Wordsworth
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
By Aldous Huxley
Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.
By Bill Cosby
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
By Isaac Bashevis Singer
Excellence equals work plus vision plus heart.
By Rob Kall
Happiness is like a pair of eyeglasses correcting your spiritual vision."
By Lloyd Morris
I am captivated more by dreams of the future than by the history of the past.
By Thomas Jefferson
I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and a more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life.
By Lin Yutang
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;
These are the days that must happen to you:
By Walt Whitman
I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces
I sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains
I sing my song to the free
By Peter Townsend
I want neither a mind without vision nor a mind without blinkers. You must be able to blind yourself for happiness in this life.
By Joseph Joubert
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
By Machiavelli
Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddied. You are the one who must grow up.
By Dag Hammarskjld
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
By H. L. Mencken
It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breath in freedom."
By Maurice Maeterlinck
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heros. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
By Henry Miller
Light that makes some things seen, makes some things invisible. Were it not for darkness and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the creation would remain unseen, and the stars in heaven invisible."
By Sir Thomas Browne
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
By Ludwig Borne
No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.
By Woodrow Wilson
Our senses perceive nothing extreme. Too much noise deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too much distance or too much proximity impedes vision; too much length or too much brevity of discourse obscures it; too much truth astonishes us: I know those who cannot comprehend that when four are taken from nothing, nothing remains. First principles have too much evidence for us... Too much youth and too much age obstruct the mind. In fine, extreme things are for us as if they were not, and we are not in regard to them: they escape us or we them.
... we burn with desire to find a firm seat and an ultimate constant basis, in order to build upon it a tower that shall reach to the infinite; but our whole foundation cracks, and the earth opens to the abyss.
By Pascal
Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. But put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.
By Claude Bernard
The brain gives the heart its sight. The heart gives the brain its vision.
By Rob Kall
The golden rule of conduct ... is mutual toleration, seeing that we will never all think alike and we shall always see Truth in fragment and from different points of vision.
By Gandhi
The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped are to deal with the world. ...our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be.
By M. Scott Peck
The senses and thoughts are like weeds on the clear water-- covering the surface of the water.
The hand of the intellect sweeps those weeds aside; then the water is revealed to the intellect...
By Rumi
There still are many rainbows in your sky,
But mine have vanish'd.
All, when life is new,
Commence with feelings warm, and prospects high;
But time strips our illusions of their hue
By Byron
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
By Bacon
Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thoughtthe subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.
By JR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
By Jonathan Swift
We generally need someone to show us things which should be apparent to the eyes of all.
By Francesco Algarotti
What is life but the angle of vision? What is life but what a man is thinking all day?"
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
By Audre Lorde
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you.
By Walt Whitman
Your dream is your best expression of yourself.
By Tom Clancy
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
By CARL JUNG
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.
By Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Your capacity to keep your vow will depend on the purity of your life.
By Ghandi
No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.
By Ghandi
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
By Ghandi
Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.
By Ghandi
Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be inseparable part of our very being.
By Ghandi
Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.
By Ghandi
Not to have control over the senses is like sailing in a rudderless ship, bound to break to pieces on coming in contact with the very first rock.
By Ghandi
Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth and the soul requires inward restfulness to attain its full height.
By Ghandi
Patience means self-suffering.
By Ghandi
Personally, I hold that a man, who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it, forfeits his manhood.
By Ghandi
Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.
By Ghandi
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. . . . It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
By Ghandi
Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.
By Ghandi
Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.
By Ghandi
Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God.
By Ghandi
Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.
By Ghandi
Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.
By Ghandi
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
By Ghandi
Take care of the means, and the end will take care of itself.
By Ghandi
The 7 Deadly Sins are:/ Wealth without work/ Pleasure without conscience/ Knowledge without character/ Business without morality/ Science without humanity/ Worship without sacrifice/ Politics without principle
By Ghandi
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
By Ghandi
The control of the palate is a valuable aid for the control of the mind.
By Ghandi
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.
By Ghandi
The good man is the friend of all living things.
By Ghandi
The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
By Ghandi
The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.
By Ghandi
The mantram becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God.
By Ghandi
The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave. His fetters fall... freedom and slavery are mental states.
By Ghandi
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
By Ghandi
The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.
By Ghandi
The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one's opponent.
By Ghandi
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
By Ghandi
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
By Ghandi
There is no god higher than truth.
By Ghandi
There is no love where there is no will.
By Ghandi
There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.
By Ghandi
There is sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.
By Ghandi
Those who know how to think need no teachers.
By Ghandi
Truth never damages a cause that is just.
By Ghandi
Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking.
By Ghandi
We must be the change we wish to see in the world.
By Ghandi
What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?
By Ghandi
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.
By Ghandi
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
By Ghandi
You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
By Ghandi
You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
By Indira Ghandi
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
By Ghandi
I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.
By Ghandi
My life is an indivisible whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind.
By Ghandi
All business depends upon men fulfilling their responsibilities.
By Ghandi
All crime is a kind of disease and should be treated as such.
By Ghandi
Almost anything you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
By Ghandi
An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
By Ghandi
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.
By Ghandi
Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.
By Ghandi
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves.
By Ghandi
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
By Ghandi
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
By Ghandi
Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.
By Ghandi
Faith must be enforced by reason. When faith becomes blind it dies.
By Ghandi
Fear has its use but cowardice has none.
By Ghandi
Freedom and slavery are mental states.
By Ghandi
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.
By Ghandi
God comes to the hungry in the form of food.
By Ghandi
Good government is no substitute for self-government.
By Ghandi
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
By Ghandi
Honesty is incompatible with amassing a large fortune.
By Ghandi
I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
By Ghandi
I believe in the doctrine of non-violence as a weapon of the weak. I believe in the doctrine of non-violence as a weapon of the strongest. I believe that a man is the strongest soldier for daring to die unarmed.
By Ghandi
I came to the conclusion long ago . . . that all religions were true, and also that all had some error in them.
By Ghandi
I claim to be an average man of less than average ability. I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.
By Ghandi
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.
By Ghandi
I eat to live, to serve, and also, if it so happens, to enjoy, but I do not eat for the sake of enjoyment.
By Ghandi
I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind - and all the worse for the fishes.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
By Ghandi
I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.
By Ghandi
I have known many meat eaters to be far more nonviolent than vegetarians.
By Ghandi
I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.
By Ghandi
I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.
By Ghandi
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
By Ghandi
If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.
By Ghandi
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
By Ghandi
If you don't ask, you don't get.
By Ghandi
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
By Ghandi
In this age of the rule of brute force, it is almost impossible for anyone to believe that any one else could possibly reject the law of the final supremacy of brute force.
By Ghandi
Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.
By Ghandi
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
By Ghandi
Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
By Ghandi
Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.
By Ghandi
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.
By Ghandi
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
By Ghandi
It is my firm conviction that all good action is bound to bear fruit in the end.
By Ghandi
It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.
By Ghandi
Let everyone try and find that as a result of daily prayer he adds something new to his life, something with which nothing can be compared.
By Ghandi
Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.
By Ghandi
Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental non-violence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.
By Ghandi
Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupation is exhilarating and life giving.
By Ghandi
Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.
By Ghandi
Civilization; I think it would be a good idea.
By Ghandi
A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
By Ghandi
A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
By Ghandi
A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.
By Ghandi
A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.
By Ghandi
A vow is fixed and unalterable determination to do a thing, when such a determination is related to something noble which can only uplift the man who makes the resolve.
By Ghandi
A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.
By Ghandi
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
By Albert Camus
In a heated argument we are apt to lose sight of the truth.
By Publilius Syrus
Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine
than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and
despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
By William James
O star of morning and of liberty!
O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!
The voices of the city and the sea,
The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy flame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations, and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.
By Dante Alighieri
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
By Noam Chomsky
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
By Noam Chomsky
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
By Noam Chomsky
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.
By Noam Chomsky
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
By Noam Chomsky
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
By Noam Chomsky
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
By Noam Chomsky
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
By Noam Chomsky
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
By Noam Chomsky
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
By Noam Chomsky
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
By Noam Chomsky
Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.
By Noam Chomsky
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
By Noam Chomsky
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
By Noam Chomsky
The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.
By Noam Chomsky
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.
By Noam Chomsky
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
By Noam Chomsky
In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.
By Noam Chomsky
Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
By Noam Chomsky
Tough love" is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
By Noam Chomsky
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
By Noam Chomsky
...jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if youre trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.
By Noam Chomsky
There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.
By Noam Chomsky
Personally I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.
By Noam Chomsky
...capitalism is basically a system where everything is for sale, and the more money you have, the more you can get. And, in particular, that's true of freedom. Freedom is one of the commodities that is for sale, and if you are affluent, you can have a lot of it. It shows up in all sorts of ways. It shows up if you get in trouble with the law, let's say, or in any aspect of life it shows up. And for that reason it makes a lot of sense, if you accept capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom, it makes it possible for you to amass that commodity. [...] what you're going to find is that the defense of free institutions will largely be in the hands of those who benefit from them, namely the wealthy, and the powerful. They can purchase that commodity and, therefore, they want those institutions to exist, like free press, and all that.
By Noam Chomsky
...there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism -- and that's why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of (Adam) Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now sprout in his name.
By Noam Chomsky
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
By Noam Chomsky
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
By Noam Chomsky
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
By Noam Chomsky
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American President would have been hanged.
By Noam Chomsky
To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
By Noam Chomsky
Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is bliss, taste it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it. Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it."
By Mother Teresa
Struggle to trust what your unconscious is up to, no matter how bizarre, how forbidden, how complex. The main characteristic of creative persons is an enormous tolerance for ambiguity. Permit yourself not to know. You are writing the story to find out what happens and why.
Since the story is writing itself, you cant know the ending, You cant know the middle. You might not know the beginning.
By Robert Burdette Sweet
Writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painfull illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one can neither resist nor understand.
By George Orwell
The best movies can cause an internal struggle, or reaffirmation of values....... An effective movie can cause us to challenge our fundamental beliefs. To re-examine our presumptions. To broaden our awareness.And even, in some cases, to change.
By Terry Rossio
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
By Tennessee Williams
As regards the celebrated 'struggle for life,' it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality--where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power."
By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The only real struggle in the history of the world . . . is between the vested interest and social justice.
By Arnold Toynbee
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
By Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies. In a war such as this, then, what is victory and how will we recognize it?
By Al Gore
Many of us have no long-range vision in much of our struggle. We think only of the moment, this time, this place, this circumstance. But think of the ten generations of children that inherit love, and their children, and theirs. . . . Anyone can count the seeds of an apple. Who can count the apples in a seed?
By Stephen Covey
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
By Noam Chomsky
The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.”
By Noam Chomsky
It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as ‘a crime under international law' in the principles of the Charter of Nuremberg.
By Noam Chomsky
I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.
By Noam Chomsky
The list of the states that have joined the coalition against terror is quite impressive. They have a characteristic in common. They are certainly among the leading terrorist states in the world. And they happen to be led by the world champion.
By Noam Chomsky
States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.
By Noam Chomsky
Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils. And in fact I think you'd find it hard to discover a mass murderer in history who didn't think that-
By Noam Chomsky
We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
By Noam Chomsky
Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...
By Noam Chomsky
Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: what kind of peace?
By Noam Chomsky
It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
By Noam Chomsky
...the point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is gonna be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
By Noam Chomsky
Each person must live their life as a model for others.
By Rosa Parks
I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.
By Rosa Parks
I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet.
By Carrie Nation
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
By Steve Biko
There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.
By Henry David Thoreau
We don't have enough time to premeditate all our actions.
By Luc Marquis De Vauvenargues
Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Action makes more fortunes than caution.
By Luc Marquis De Vauvenargues
Performance must precede volition.
By Alain
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
By George Bernard Shaw
Adversity has ever been considered as the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being free from flatterers.
By Samuel Johnson
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
By Samuel Johnson
Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.
By Bhagavad Gita
What is your religion? I mean-- not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most.
By George Eliot
I do not believe in belief.
By E.M. Forster
I swear gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness-- a real thorough-going illness.
By Feodor Dostoevski
What is the use of the book," thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?
By Lewis Carroll
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
By Winston S. Churchill
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best creed we can have is charity toward the creeds of others.
By Josh Billings
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
By E.M. Forster
The secret of happiness is curiosity
By Norman Douglas
an educated man is one who has the right loves and hatreds.
By Lin Yutang
Without a gentle contempt for education, no gentleman's education is complete.
By G. K. Chesterton
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
By Oscar Wilde
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge.
By Alfred North Whitehead
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
By William James
Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself a slave to it.
By Benjamin Franklin
One should be just as careful in choosing one's pleasures as in avoiding calamities.
By Chinese Proverb
Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
By Samuel Johnson
It is not enough to have great qualities, we should also have the management of them.
By La Rochefoucauld
A man who has work that suits him and a wife whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.
By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
By Winston S. Churchill
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
By Mark Twain
An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half. . . . I never write "metropolis" for seven cents, because I can get the same money for "city." I never write "policeman," because I can get the same price for "cop." . . . I never write "valetudinarian" at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.
By Mark Twain
Words are the clothes that thoughts wear-- only the clothes.
By Samuel Butler
Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear.
By Joseph Joubert
He who does not know the force of words cannot know men.
By Confucius
Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial "we.
By Mark Twain
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
By Robert Lynd
You can't say that civilization don't advance, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
By Will Rogers
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
By Eric Hoffer
It is my certain conviction that no man loses his freedom except through his own weakness.
By Mohandas Gandhi
He who feels this will is not free is insane; he who denies it is foolish.
By Friedrich Nietzsche
To free oneself is nothing; it's being free that is hard.
By Andre' Gide
”One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.
By Martin Luther King
Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change.
By Martin Luther King
The love of possession is a disease with them.
By Chief Sitting Bull
According to the legend, the marabout who founded El-Hamel at the end of he sixteenth century stopped to spend the night near a spring and planted his stick in the ground. The next morning, when he went for it to resume his journey, he found that it had taken root and that buds had sprouted on it. He considered this a sign of God's will and settled in that place.
...When no sign manifests itself, it is provoked. For example, a sort of evocation is performed with the help of animals; it is they who show what place is fit to receive the sanctuary or the village. This amounts to an evocation of sacred forms or figures for the immediate purpose of establishing an orientation in the homogeneity of space. A sign is asked, to put an end to the tension and anxiety caused by relativity and disorientation-- in short, to reveal an absolute point of support. For example, a wild animal is hnted, and the sanctuary is built on the place where it is killed. Or a domestic animal, such as a bull-- is turned loose; some days later it is searched for and sacrificed at the place where it is found. Later the altar will be raised there and the village will be built around the altar. ...This is as much to say that men are not free to choose the sacred site, that they only seek for it and find it by the help of mysterious signs.
By Mircea Eliade
..we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. ...a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
By John Steinbeck
Success is not a place at which one arrives, but rather... the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey
By Alex Noble
Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up,
By Studs Terkel
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
By Albert Camus
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
By Martin Luther King
"It is more dishonourable to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them."
By La Rochefoucauld
But to see him in that way, how shall I be able to judge of his character? I shall merely see his outward appearance, look and mien; but as to the rest, Isabella, what trust can I put in it? These flattering mirrors reflect imperfectly what is within; the appearance is often a gay deceiver; what defects of mind lie hidden under its beauty!
And what fair exteriors conceal base souls! The eyes, no doubt, in this important choice of a husband, must be the first to act; but to trust everything to them is to put everything to hazard: he who wishes to live at ease ought not to displease them, but without being a slave, he ought to reckon it enough to give them satisfaction, to yield if they object, but not assent if they agree, and to allow the fire of love to be lighted up from other causes. This chain, which lasts as long as our life, and ought to excite more fear than envy, if we do not take care, often joins opposite to opposite, and the dead to the living: and for myself, since it is necessary that it give me a master, before accepting him I should like to know him, but to know him in his inmost soul.
By Pierre Corneille
Amusement that is excessive and pursued only for its own sake allures and deceives us, and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the grave
By Blaise Pascal
To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
By Eric Hoffer
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.
By Thich Nhat Hanh
I'm jealous of anyone who makes a light bulb flash on in your head.
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections, There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.
By Umberto Eco
What ails most of them, and what has ailed them most of their lives, is that they lack curiosity. They have never engaged themselves strongly in anything. The waters of life have washed over them without anything soaking in. They are not interesting when old because they were never interesting when young.
Curiosity... is the greatest preservative and the supreme emollient. Enthusiasm. Zest. That's what makes old age... a delight. One has seen so much, and one is eager to see more. One has reached a few conclusions. The twilight years (!) are a glorious sundown.
When we have lost our curiosity about our world we have lost much, though not all.
We have lost all when we cease to be curious about ourselves, for that means that we have indeed abandoned hope. When we succumb to the bodily and mental habits of those who have given upall hope of change or improvement, we have lifted the hatch of the tomb.
By Robertson Davies
Love is a desire of the whole being to be united to some other being.
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All the arts, which have a tendency to raise man in the scale of being, have a certain common bond of union, and are connected, if I may be allowed to say so, by blood- relationship with one another.
By Marcus Tullius Cicero
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
By Aristotle
Happiness is neither within us nor without us; it is the union of ourselves with God.
By Blaise Pascal
Hence all things being caused and causing, aided and aiding, mediate and immediate, and all inter-connected by a natural and imperceptible tie that unites the remotest and most diverse, I hold it impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, any more than to know the whole without knowing the particular parts.
By Blaise Pascal
Good will links together with our own powers and possessions the powers and possessions of every being it embraces. Man is an immense being in some sort, who can exist partially, but whose existence grows more delectable as it grows fuller, more entire.
By Joseph Joubert
Soul is what connects you to everyone and everything else. It is the sum of all the choices you make. It is where your beliefs and values reside. Soul is at the center of our relationships to others, and for me it is at the center of the business enterprise."
By Tom Chappell
With enlightenment and self-awareness, we can reguide and realign our whole selves: our bodies, by finding new ways of moving and celebrating them and by adding good foods in amounts they tell us they need; our soul, our sense of ourselves as good and worthwhile, by connecting them to the earth and to each other.
By Diana Roesch
"What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man. All things are connected.
"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
"Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover --our God is the same God. You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land: but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is precious to Him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt upon its Creator.
"The Whites, too, shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
"But in your perishing, you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered. the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted out by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone."
By Chief Seattle
Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.
By Bertrand Russell
Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect.
By Chief Seattle
Mitakuye Oyasin.
[We are all related.]
By Lakota Belief
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace;
The soul that knows it not knows no release
From little things.
By Amelia Earheart
What custom hath endeared
We part with sadly, though we prize it not."
SAFETY, DANGER, RELEASE, RESCUE"
You are come off now with a whole skin."
By Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. .....This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffeee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco or whatever other species of animal exhilaration."
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart.
By Mencius
Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.
By Meister Eckhart
If the cask is to hold the wine, its water must first be poured out.
By Meister Eckhart
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depends upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance,-- and so quit a certainty for an uncertainty
By Seneca
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
By Aldous Huxley
Patch grief with proverbs.
By William Shakespeare
Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.
By Seneca
Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.
By Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.
By Robert Byrne
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Compassion is not religious business,
it is human business,
it is not luxury,
it is essential for our own peace and mental stability,
it is essential for human survival.
By Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)
The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship. --Observe, I am talking about minds. I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;-- but on the other hand, that the brain runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special Talent, and the mastery of Successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
By Virginia Woolf
Patriotism and critiquing your country go hand in hand.
By Jack Kemp
We have to change the definition of citizenship so you can't pat yourself on the back for paying your taxes, obeying the law, taking care of your family, and being a good voter. You have to be a public servant as a private citizen. The interdependent world demands it.
By Bill Clinton
Go to the People.
Live among them,
Love them,
Learn from them.
Start from where they are,
Work with them,
Build on what they have.
But with the best leaders,
When the task is accomplished,
The work completed,
The people all remark:
We have done it ourselves.
By Lao Tzu
You can't win Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
By George Lucas
If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord, make Myself known to him in a vision, and I speak to him in a dream.
By God
We must remember that elections are short term efforts. Revolutions are long term projects.
By Ron Paul
The higher power with whom I try to stay in touch is concerned first and foremost with justice and then (only then) peace. In the biblical sense, peace is no more nor less than the experience of justice.
By Ray McGovern
Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment....
By Lao Tzu
Journalism is an act of faith in the future.
By Ann Curry
Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them therefore liberals and serviles,... Whigs and Tories,... aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of aristocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all
By Thomas Jefferson
No one can doubt that the wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed, but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. No one can doubt that cooperation in the pursuit of knowledge must lead to freedom of the mind and of the soul.
By John F. Kennedy
The only way to get it together... is together.
By Rabbi Zalman Schacter Shalomi
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
By Albert Camus
Insistence on bi-partisanship goes AGAINST Democracy
By Barney Frank
We did not come here to clean up crises. We came here to build a future.
By Barack Obama
The time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action.
By Barack Obama
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of
supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a
decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious
adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man
By Joseph Campbell
This first stage of the mythological journey--which we have designated the "call to adventure" --signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.
By Joseph Campbell
Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?
By Noam Chomsky
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
By Martin Luther King
Democracy is the best revenge
By Benazir Bhutto
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