Quotes: Personal, Political, Social and Creative
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung
"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
— Rabindranath Tagore
“I think the place I identify most with is the border.”
— Mariam Ghani
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words. I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
— John Coltrane
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin—more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
— Bertrand Russell
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."
— Nelson Mandela
"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
— Francisco de Goya
"If we wash our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, we side with the powerful. We don't remain neutral."
— Banksy
"Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty-towns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American and Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of traveling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind..."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss
"I get nervous when they start shooting piano players."
— Harry Nilsson
"Tonight I put my lips to the breast of the whole round and warring earth."
— Marina Tsvetaeva
"An organized people that knows its history, is a people that cannot be oppressed."
— Ufulu Bomani
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
― Pema Chödrön
“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
— Arundhati Roy
"I act brave because the danger is really there. If I don't act, the danger grows stronger."
— Ai Weiwei
"I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being.
— Leonora Carrington
“Love crosses its islands, from grief to grief, it sets its roots, watered with tears, and no one—no one—can escape the heart’s progress as it runs, silent and carnivorous.” — Pablo Neruda
"People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them."
— Julie Mehretu
"I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be."
— Paddy Chayefsky
"I think of sculpture not as a person, animal or other natural or geometrical form situated in space: the sculpture contains within itself a dialogue between spirit and flesh."
— Ernst Neizvestny
“Someday the earth will weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice, if you will help her or let her die, and when she dies, you too will die.”
— Hollow Horn Bear, Lakota
"In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."
— Adam Curtis
"Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry."
— Mary Oliver
"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."
— Frank Zappa
“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”
— Zadie Smith
"If the corporations have their way, the Earth will be killed, and that's in your lifetime. It's revolting to me that students are being trained to work in corporations. It's obscene to me that the corporations are running the world. We've got to get cross. Anger is an appropriate emotion."
— Dr. Helen Caldicott
"Man, by his very nature, tends to give himself an explanation of the world into which he is born. And this is what distinguishes him from the other species. Every individual, even the least intelligent, the lowest of outcasts, from childhood on gives himself some explanation of the world. And with it he manages to live. And without it, he would sink into madness."
— Elsa Morante
"The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. "
— Muhammad Ali (Regarding Vietnam.)
"It wasn't the New World that mattered... Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all."
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind."
— John F. Kennedy
"People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' than it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'"
— Natasha Trethewey
"Literally, he paints her portrait, then he can fuck off —he can leave. When Leonardo DiCaprio is freezing in the water, she notices that he’s dead, and starts to shout, ‘I will never let you go,’ but while she is shouting this, she is pushing him away. It’s not even a love story. Again, Captains Courageous: the upper classes... act like a vampire to suck the vitality from a lower-class guy. Once they replenish their energy, he can fuck off."
— Slavoj Zizek on 'Titanic'
“I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics... I am a Chilean who for decades has known the misfortunes and difficulties of our national existence and who has taken part in each sorrow and joy of the people."
— Pablo Neruda
"That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is."
— Julie Mehretu
"The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure—roads, bridges, schools, dams—that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers. "
— Naomi Klein
"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
— Mark Twain
Title. Double click me.
"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privelege and adventure."
— Dr. Oliver Sacks
"Art is a way of sleeping with the enemy."
— Marlene Dumas
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
— Milan Kundera
"In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate."
— Toni Morrison
"We are really just 220 million used car salesmen who have no qualms about killing anybody who makes us uncomfortable."
— Hunter Thompson
"Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing."
— Arundhati Roy
“Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name.”
— Jean Debuffet
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"While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate." — Käthe Kollwitz
"Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we are all in it together."
— Winona LaDuke
"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."
— W.B. Yeats
"The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity."
— Naomi Klein
"The true measure of a free society... is how it treats its dissidents."
— Glenn Greenwald
“I choose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America - poverty, racism, discrimination.” — Gordon Parks
"The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
— Frida Kahlo
"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in."
— Julian Assange
"The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment."
— Chris Hedges
"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."
— Frantz Fanon
"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert
"Your style is who you are when you're not trying to be clever or better than you actually are." — John Currin
"Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics."
— Susan Sontag
“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”
— Pier Paolo Pasolini
"Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune."
— Carl Jung
“Being a leftist is a calling, not a career; it’s a vocation... It means you are concerned about structural violence, you are concerned about exploitation... you are concerned about institutionalized contempt against gay brothers and lesbian sisters, hatred against peoples of color, and the subordination of women. It means that you are willing to fight against them, and... the sources of social misery...That’s what it means to be a leftist...”
— Dr. Cornel West
“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
— Adrienne Rich
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
— Noam Chomsky
"The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open"
— John Berger
"If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth."
— Julian Assange
“Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
— Naomi Klein
"If you put frightening things into a picture then they can't harm you. If fact, you end becoming quite fond of them."
— Paula Rego
"There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?"
-— Woody Allen
"Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet."
— Alice Walker
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
— Frederick Douglass
"Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever misarranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes. And we're worried about that. So there came this point in human evolution when we lost our innocence. When we lost this thing that the cats and the flowers have, and had to think about it, and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols, accountancy, calculation and so on, and then we worry."
— Alan Watts
''The worst act of violence is the humiliation of the mind."
— Elsa Morante
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
— George Orwell
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
— Gustave Flaubert
"To find one's way anywhere one has to find one's door, just like Alice, you see. You take too much of one thing and you get too big, then you take too much of another and you get too small. You've got to find your own doorway into things."
— Paula Rego
"When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned."
— Kshama Sawant
"The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest."
— Chris Hedges
“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”.
— Nelson Mandela
"Humor is reason gone mad."
— Groucho Marx
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
— Leonardo da Vinci
"We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, sketch is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture."
— Milan Kundera
"Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art."
— Susan Sontag
“There is a taboo on telling the truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel. Only when this truth is out can any of us be free.”
— Edward Said
"The best people posses a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."
— Ernest Hemingway
"Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity."
— Friedrich Nietzsch
“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
— Assata Shakur
Title. Double click me.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman
"Anybody can become angry—that is easy—but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."
— Aristotle
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force."
— George Bernard Shaw
"I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew. The truth has shared so much of Itself with me that I can no longer call myself a man, a woman, an angel, or even a pure Soul. Love has befriended me so completely. It has turned to ash and freed me."
— Hafez
"Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope."
— Mahmoud Darwish
"I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain."
— Audre Lorde
"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal."
— John Steinbeck
"Yes, 'anti-political politics' is possible. Politics 'from below'. Politics of man, not of the apparatus. Politics growing from the heart, not from a thesis. It is not an accident that this hopeful experience has to be lived just here, on this grim battlement. Under the 'rule of everydayness' we have to descend to the very bottom of a well before we can see the stars."
— Vaclav Havel
“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
— Jeanette Winterson
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know."
— Noam Chomsky
"I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life. We unleashed the first atomic bomb, and I hope there will never be another. I pray that we have learned a lesson for all time. But I'm not sure that we have."
— Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, US Air Force Captain Navigator, "Enola Gay" Aug. 6th, 1945 (Statement of regret in 2005)
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." — Friedrich Nietzsche
"Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service."
— Joan Didion
“I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize—sometimes with astonishment—how happy we had been.” — Nikos Kazantzakis
“People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television before they ever see a courtroom.”
— Assata Shakur
“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”
— Henry David Thoureau
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
— D.H. Lawrence
"We are dancing to the edge of life and we now move through the forests of dread and what we fear, really fear, is not some other nation conquering our plains and mountains and deserts, no, no, what we fear is that someone or something will do to us exactly what we have done to the buffalo, and to the mounted warrior on horseback with that lance and bow, what we have done to the rivers and the trees and the fine native grasses that first fell under our footsteps as we ventured into the bewitching and yearning ground."
— Charles Bowden
"It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin."
— Susan Sontag
"The capitalist economy is not real, it is a castle in the sky, a delusion in the head of cocaine addicts."
— John Maynard Keynes
"The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned."
— Dag Hammarskjold
"There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty."
— Rupert Sheldrake
"Wherever the crowd goes, run in the opposite direction. They're always wrong."
— Charles Bukowski
"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."
— John Lennon
"You get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one."
— Sibel Edmonds
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
"I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill."
— Kara Walker
"It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country."
— Will Durant
"The conflict between politics and art...cannot and must not be solved."
— Hannah Arendt
"The truth is like a lion. You don't have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself."
— St. Augustine
“Memory a wind passing through the blood trees within us”
— Carolyn Forché, (from 'The Angel of History' )
"A riot is the language of the unheard."
— Dr. Martin Luther King
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
— Milan Kundera
"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."
— Jorge Luis Borges
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Anaïs Nin
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
― Charles Bukowski
"I am rooted, but I flow."
— Virginia Woolf
"I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring."
— Julien Benda
Title. Double click me.
"Basically, both the Mafia and America feel they are benevolent organizations. And both the Mafia and America have their hands stained with blood from what it is necessary to do to protect their power and interests. " – Francis Ford Coppola
"The civilians at the other end of our weapons don't have a choice, but American soldiers have choices, and while there may have been some doubt 5 years ago, today we know the truth. Our soldiers don't sacrifice for duty-honor-country, they sacrifice for Kellogg Brown & Root."
— Dahlia Wasfi
"Propoganda is the executive arm of the invisible government."
— Edward Bernays
"Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer."
— Henry Kissinger
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire
"Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality."
— Hannah Arendt
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilzation in between."
— Oscar Wilde
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.”
— John Berger
"About two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining."
— Winona LaDuke
"The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology."
— Jean Genet
"Wisdom is not knowledge. Knowledge deals with the particular and the actual. Knowledge is the domain of science and technology. Wisdom is about transcendence. Wisdom allows us to see and accept reality, no matter how bleak that reality may be. It is only through wisdom that we are able to cope with the messiness and absurdity of life. Wisdom is about detachment."
— Chris Hedges
"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard."
— Anne Sexton
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.” — Jim Morrison
"Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."
— Audre Lorde
"Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret."
— Ben Okri
“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
— Hannah Arendt
"A poem begins with a lump in the throat."
— Robert Frost
"Doubt is one of the names of intelligence."
— Jorge Luis Borges
"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
— Pablo Picasso
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation”
— Julia Kristeva
“I'm more interested in a photography that is 'unfinished' - a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in. ” — Paolo Pellegrin
“Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? ...I say, break the law.”
— Henry David Thoreau
"Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." — Graham Greene
"Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists."
— Dr. Cornel West
"We must dare to speak out in support of those American war-resisters, the real military heroes, who uphold their oath to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, including those terrorist cells in Washington DC more commonly known as the legislative, executive and judicial branches."
— Dahlia Wasfi
"As a doctor, as well as a mother and a world citizen, I wish to practice the ultimate form of preventive medicine by ridding the earth of these technologies that propagate disease, suffering, and death."
— Helen Caldicott
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejec- tion and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
— Charles Bukowski
"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness."
— Alice Walker
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." — Will Durant
“As long as there’s one nuclear weapon existing, nobody is free.”
— Sister Megan Rice
“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men… of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
— Bertand Russell
"Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history."
— Hannah Arendt
"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself."
— Noam Chomsky
Title. Double click me.
"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in."
— Julian Assange
"The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment."
— Chris Hedges
"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."
— Frantz Fanon
"Your style is who you are when you're not trying to be clever or better than you actually are." — John Currin
"It always seems impossible until it's done."
— Nelson Mandela
"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda."
— Hannah Arendt
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
— Studs Terkel
"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics."
— Susan Sontag
“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.”
— Pier Paolo Pasolini
"Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune."
— Carl Jung
“Being a leftist is a calling, not a career; it’s a vocation... It means you are concerned about structural violence, you are concerned about exploitation... you are concerned about institutionalized contempt against gay brothers and lesbian sisters, hatred against peoples of color, and the subordination of women. It means that you are willing to fight against them, and... the sources of social misery...That’s what it means to be a leftist...”
— Dr. Cornel West
“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
— Adrienne Rich
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
— Noam Chomsky
"The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open"
— John Berger
"If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth."
— Julian Assange
"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
— Toni Morrison
"It always seems impossible until it's done."
— Nelson Mandela
"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda."
— Hannah Arendt
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
— Studs Terkel
"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
"To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world."
— Rupert Sheldrake
"The appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling—in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked."
— Kazimir Malevich
"I don't like the Left in America, because they are just well-fed Westwood Village little ninnies screaming slogans. They are too worried about getting a job or getting marijuana or tires for their cars or cocaine or going to a discotheque. So I don't think there is any underground radical movement here. Anything underground radical is media hype, just strict bullshit; and anybody who gets into it will quickly go into anything else that gathers them monetary gains. Abbie Hoffman, all those slickers. The whole Left in America is just glorious bullshit hype—nothing like the Wobblies in the '20s. The American Left are white-bellied shrieks of nowhere they have always been. At least you could talk to those guys, the Wobblies... But the Left... They don't know what struggle really means. The fight is in the streets. I come from the streets. I understand the streets. But the streets are the streets. There isn't much you can do with them. The streets are very beautiful... The streets are good, they are full of people, marvelous people, and I don't like the rich any more than you do. You can put fifty thousand dollars in my bank, I still don't like the rich. I may eat dinner with them in the same cafes, the maitre d' might know my name, but I still don't like them. Because they are dead. I don't like dead people, even if they have one million dollars. I take their million but I don't take them."
— Charles Bukowski
"I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service... We have betrayed our readers, just to push for war… I don’t want this anymore, I’m fed up with this propaganda. We live in a banana republic, and not in a democratic country where we have press freedom..."
— Dr. Udo Ulfkotte
"Tyranny is better organized than freedom."
— Charles Peguy
“Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently”
— Rose Luxemburg
Title. Double click me.
"The people must be helped to understand that they will make little progress unless they are more politically self-reliant and are prepared to organise with others, nearest to them where they work and where they live, to achieve what they want. An individualist philosophy tenuously linked to an aristocratic political leadership will get them nowhere."
— Tony Benn
"And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it."
— Marina Tsvetaeva
"A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits."
— Molly Crabapple
"We have gone too far; we do not know how to stop; impetus
Is all we have. And we share it with the pushed Inert.
We are clever, -- we are as clever as monkeys; and some of us
Have intellect, which is our danger, for we lack intelligence
And have forgotten instinct."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
“My belief was that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”
— Gen. Dwight Eisenhower (from his memoirs "Mandate for Change")
“The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. Wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
— Adm. William Leahy (was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)
"I do vote but I don't think that any political party represents my point of view."
— Rupert Sheldrake
"I've needed an impulse from within, a lot of emotional energy to do this stuff, and a kind of desire. It's a very aggressive thing... It's not an aggression like you're hitting it; it's a sensual aggression, if you like."
— Paula Rego
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
— Assata Shakur
"How have we come so quickly to forget the lessons we were forced to learn together? Why have we subjugated our memory in the vain hope that we will be able to live above and beyond history? When will we cease presiding over the mutilation of memory?
I prefer the remembrance, the painful bitter recall. I know that I need a brother who shares this tender taunting heritage. I desire a sister who is not in denial of our mutual past. Together, we may be able to plan a less painful future. Separate, we can only anticipate further ruptures and deeper loneliness."
— Maya Angelou
Title. Double click me.
"While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations."
— Assata Shakur
"Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel."
— Ivan Turgenev
“The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war.”
— Rosa Luxemburg
"The 'innocent eye' is a fiction, based on the absurd notion that what we perceive in the present can be isolated in the mind from the influence of past experience There is no perception of “pure form” but meaning seeps in, and settles on the image."
— Arthur Koestler
"I remembered the crew sitting in stunned silence on the return flight. The only words I recollect hearing were [Copilot Robert] Lewis's "My God, what have we done."
"I was dumbfounded. Remember, nobody had ever seen what an A-bomb could do before. Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas, one minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered with fires and smoke...There was almost no talk I can remember on our trip back to the base. It was just too much to express in words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock."
— From memoirs of Joe Stiborik, US Air Force Sergeant (Radar Operator, "Enola Gay" ) Aug. 6th, 1945
"During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again."
— Alejandro Jodorowsky
"If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet & peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody."
— Leonora Carrington
"As you well know... you can't measure capital. It's like love. It's very important. It exists. Like beauty, right? I mean, anyone who denies the concept of beauty is a very sad person. Nevertheless, anyone who tries to measure it is going to destroy beauty and love, and certainly never know it."
— Yanis Varoufakis
"Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth."
— Rupert Sheldrake
“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
— Arundhati Roy
“Good morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on.”
— Langston Hughes
"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live."
— Irish Proverb
"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their collegues, the wrath of society. Moral Courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence; Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world, that yields most painfully to change."
— Robert F. Kennedy
"And love became the worlds origin and the worlds ruler, yet littered its path is with flowers and blood, flowers and blood."
— Knut Hamsun
"Silence is the dealiest weapon of mass destruction."
— Cynthia McKinney
"We can only blame ourselves, so come sit with me in the dark. It's half-past nowhere, everywhere.." — Charles Bukowski
"To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought..."
— Shakespeare
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”
— Victor Hugo
"I step outside for a smoke and it’s obvious the world is ending. Someone let the poets out and they’re eating all of the birds. "
— Gregory Sherl
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
— Aldous Huxley
Title. Double click me.
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."
— Susan Sontag
"You never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice."
— Bob Marley
"While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate." — Käthe Kollwitz
“The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.”
— Harry Callahan
“Don’t swallow the concocted belief of the impenetrability of government and institutions...”
— Ralph Nader
"Only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed."
— Naomi Klein
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubt but the stupid people are full of confidence."
— Charles Bukowski
“That faith be analyzable does not necessarily imply a method for getting by without it. . . .”
— Julia Kristeva
"I do believe, desperately, in a 'poetry of ideas'. Poems have got, literally, to be about something. And the weights of love, murder, history, economics, etc., have got to drag whoever's writing in a personally sanctified direction or there will be no poems at all." — Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
"We are dancing to the edge of life and we now move through the forests of dread and what we fear, really fear, is not some other nation conquering our plains and mountains and deserts, no, no, what we fear is that someone or something will do to us exactly what we have done to the buffalo, and to the mounted warrior on horseback with that lance and bow, what we have done to the rivers and the trees and the fine native grasses that first fell under our footsteps as we ventured into the bewitching and yearning ground."
— Charles Bowden
"As the traveler sailing between the islands of the archipelago sees rising at night the luminous vapors, and gradually discovers the coastline, so I begin to see the outline of my death? " — Marguerite Yourcenar
“...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.”
― Joan Didion
"The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights."
— J. Paul Getty
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."
— Oscar Wilde
“Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.”
— Susan Sontag
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
— Alan Watts
"We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds, dead sciences. And it is the past which is engulfing us, not the future. The future always has and always will belong to—the poet."
— Henry Miller (The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud)
"I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art."
— Tina Madotti
"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
— Vaclav Havel
"Friendship... is not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything."
— Muhammad Ali
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
— Rumi
"There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives."
— Audre Lorde
"I never think about the future, it comes soon enough."
— Albert Einstein
“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men… of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
— Bertand Russell
"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
— Oscar Wilde
“Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” — Arundhati Roy
"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus
"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally."
— Oscar Wilde
"Some see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." -— Robert F. Kennedy
"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none... "
— Shakespeare
“The worst is over, the worst is yet to come”
— Carolyn Forché
"Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."
— Rumi
"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."
— Susan Sontag
“There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
"Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy."
— Saadi
"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."
— Jimi Hendrix
"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less. "
— Václav Havel (Letters to Olga)
“No one has ever written or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, invented, except to get out of hell.” — Antonin Artaud
"If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up."
— Adrienne Rich
“The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.” — Ralph Ellison
“To paraphrase several sages: nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
— Susan Sontag
"Today we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled—we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there?
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost."
— Erich Maria Remarque
“If there is a soul, it is a mistake to bel
ieve that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.” — Albert Camus
“I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high—whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops—is inherently suspect.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich
"Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity."
— Naomi Klein
"Never lend books –nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me."
— Anatole France
"Our America was that of the Creole and the original peoples, the black and the mulatto, the mixed-race and working America that must join the cause of the oppressed and the destitute." — Jose Marti
Title. Double click me.
"You don't have to be a Jew to be a Diasporist."
— RB Kitaj
"Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation."
— Hannah Arendt
"Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity."
— Henry Miller (The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud)
"Those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
— Gustave Le Bon
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
— Joan Didion
"Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain."
— Gabor Maté
"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m.that matter."
— Medea Benjamin
“Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
— T.S. Eliot
"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."
— John Lennon
"If making sure that workers get out of poverty would severely impact the economy, then maybe we don't need this economy."
— Kshama Sawant
"Stoned and drugged with euphoria and uncertainty, Berliners walked across the rotting teeth of a wall that had divided them for 30 years, the haze of warfare and death still hanging awkwardly in the air like some vengeful bird of prey, its appetite set to let loose a new trauma and a new displacement. Unity? Then enters some American asshole with Christmas lights on his jacket singing a pop song about years of collective trauma and a hangover of cheap products, and Stasi disappearances like he knew something, which was clear, he did not. From his leather jacket to his mullet, Hasselhoff represented the anti-Christ of the west, full of opportunism and the death of guilt built on a suffering he never felt."
— Brad Feuerhelm
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
— George Orwell
“Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components—that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.”
— Julia Kristeva
"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
"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." — George Bernard Shaw
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
— John Steinbeck
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give."
— Adrienne Rich
"You gentlemen who think you have a mission
to purge us of the seven deadly sins,
should first sort out the basic food position,
then start your preaching! That’s where it begins.
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well,
should learn, for once, the way the world is run:
However much you twist, whatever lies you tell,
food is the first thing, morals follow on.
So first make sure that those who now are starving
get proper helpings when we all start carving.
What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions
are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
in keeping its humanity repressed."
— Bertolt Brecht
"Technology is a big destroyer of truth....."
— Jack White
"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois."
— Gustave Flaubert
"During the Cold War, widespread alcoholism was always seen in the West as evidence that life under Communism was so dismal that Russians needed large quantities of vodka to get through the day. Under capitalism, however, Russians drinks more than twice as much alcohol as they used to—and they are reaching for harder painkillers as well."
— Naomi Klein
"Cynicism is the greatest enemy of reform."
— Robert Reich
"Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves."
— Adrienne Rich
“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
— Arundhati Roy
"I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own."
— Audre Lorde
"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." — Socrates
“I don’t believe in marriage. No, I really don’t. Let me be clear about that. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it’s a happy delusion – these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don’t think it’s conservative or delusional. I think it’s radical and courageous and very romantic.”
— Tina Modotti
"Whatever makes an impression on the heart seems lovely in the eye."
— Saadi
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” — George Orwell
"Progress -- progress is the dirtiest word in the language--who ever told us --
And made us believe it - - that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always
A good idea? In this unlighted cave, one step forward
That step can be the down-step into the Abyss.
But we, we have no sense of direction; impetus
Is all we have; we do not proceed, we only
Roll down the mountain,
Like disbalanced boulders, crushing before us many
Delicate springing things, whose plan it was to grow."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.”
— Henry Miller
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)
“Touring the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, astute observer of the young Republic, noted the “feverish ardor” of its citizens to accumulate. Yet, even as the typical American “clutches at everything,” the Frenchman wrote, “he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.” However munificent his possessions, the American hungered for more, an obsession that filled him with “anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation.”2”
— Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
"Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not."
— Leo Tolstoy
“I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee”
— Stephen Vincent Benét
"I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction."
— Julie Mehretu
"Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life."
— Giorgio de Chirico
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
— Frederick Douglass, 1857
"Civilization is no longer a fragile flower, to be carefully preserved and reared with great difficulty here and there in sheltered corners of a territory rich in natural resources... All that is over: humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk, as if it were sugar-beet."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss
“Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.”
— Assata Shakur
"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant."
— H. L. Mencken
"These days one must think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being."
— May Sarton, as quoted by "boozy" Barley Blair (David Cornwell aka John Le Carre)
Title. Double click me.
"A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you'll look forward to the trip." — Is said to be inscribed on the Tomb of The Unknown Refugee