Quotes: Politics, Equality, Liberty, Faith, Hope, Religion
Quotes: Politics, Equality, Liberty, Faith, Hope, Religion
By nature men are nearly all alike; by practise they get to be wide apart.
-Confucius
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
-Stanislaw Lec
The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order- if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours- then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man's freedom did not become another man's tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty.
-Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
If liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.
-Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it’s the only thing.
-Albert Schweitzer
Most people were raised to believe that they were just as good as the next person, but I was always told I was better.
-Katherine Hepburn
It is a great and dangerous error to assume that all people are equally entitled to liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike...not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded, and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.
-John C. Calhoun
Only he deserves freedom and life who daily conquers them anew.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
-Barack Obama in 2002
There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America - there's the United States of America.
-Barack Obama in 2004 National Convention Speech
Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?
-Ayn Rand
There were some who had tried to help their people, and who had sent their sons to schools. And the Government had tried to help them too. But they were feeding an old man with milk, and pretending that he would one day grow into a boy.
-Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. they don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.
-Neil Gaiman
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
-Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
-Winston Churchill
The Judge does not make the Law. It is the People that make the Law. Therefore if a Law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the Law, that is justice, even if it is not just. It is the duty of a Judge to do justice, but it is only the People that can be just. Therefore if justice be not just, that is not to be laid at the door of the Judge, but at the door of the People.
-Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
The truth is useless. You have to understand this right now. You can't deposit the truth in a bank. You can't buy groceries with the truth. You can't pay rent with the truth. The truth is a useless commodity that will hang around your neck like an albatross all the way to the homeless shelter. And if you think that the million or so people in this country that are really interested in the truth about their government can support people who would tell them the truth, you got another thing coming. Because the million or so people in this country that are truly interested in the truth don't have any money.
-Jeb Bush
But it has been well said that a selfish and greedy people cannot be free.
-Franklin Roosevelt
I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
-Voltaire
And this I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it.
-Mark Twain
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
-Helen Keller
I do not think much of the man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
-Abraham Lincoln
Nicht dass du mich belogst, sondern dass ich dir nicht mehr glaube, hat mich erschüttert. I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil, 183”
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
-C.S. Lewis
But if you build your life on dreams it's prudent to recall; a man with moonlight in his hands has nothing there at all.
-Don Quixote
Be with those who mix with God as honey blends with milk, and say, "Anything that comes and goes, rises and sets, is not what I love," else you'll be like a caravan fire left to flare itself out alone beside the road.
-Rumi, One-Handed Basket Weaving
Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral.
-Richard Nixon
The current state of knowledge can be summarised thus: in the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.
-Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
-Buddha
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.
-Francis Picabia
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things that nobody knows if they're true or not. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
- Neil Gaiman, American Gods
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
-Oscar Wilde
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-Voltaire
A little philosophy makes a man an atheist, a great deal reconciles him to religion.
-Francis Bacon
I don't deny God, its just that I don't know if He created Man, or Man created Him.
-Fyodor Dostoevesky
If atheism is a lack of belief in God, then baldness is a lack of belief in hair.
-Jean Paul Satre
Say what you will about the miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
-Kurt Vonnegut
I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.
-Susan B. Anthony
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not question.
-Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion.
-Mark Twain
Evolution is more grounded in my experience than angels.
-Barack Obama in 2006
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
-Gandhi
I am a Hindu by birth. And yet I do not know much of Hinduism, and I know less of other religions. In fact I do not know where I am, and what is and what should be my belief. I intend to make a careful study of my own religion and, as far as I can, of other religions as well.
-Gandhi
Is there an infinite outside of us? Is this infinite, one, immanent, permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite, and because, if matter were lacking in it, it would in that respect be limited; necessarily intelligent, because it is infinite, and since if it lacked intelligence, it would be tot hat extent, finite? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we are able to attribute to ourselves the idea of existence only? In other words, is it not absolute of which we are the relative?
At the same time, while there is an infinite outside of us, is there not an infinite within us? These two infinites (frightening plural!), do they not rest superimposed on one another? Does the second infinite not underline the first, so to speak? Is it not the mirror, the reflection, the echo of the first, an abyss concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinite intelligent, also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If the two infinites are intelligent, each one of them has a principle of will, and there is a "me" in the infinite above, as there is a "me" in the infinite below. The "me" below is the soul; the "me" above is God.
-Victo Hugo, Les Miserables