other people’s words – my favorite quotes: A-J

A-J under construction / K-M / N-Z

Edward Abbey

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

It’s been a guiding force in my life.

When we feel we ought to do something and yet do nothing, we will slowly die inside.

We know we ought to create and move towards beauty, but we let fear and laziness win in the battle of our will, and so we turn to our tv’s and phones for comfort and distraction, and wonder why we’re depressed.

The good news…

The converse is also true. When we do take action toward that thing we know we ought to do, we bring life to our soul.

Shana Abe

I heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved.

Douglas Noel Adams

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

—#—

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

—#—

A learning experience is one of those things that say, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”

Dr. Patch Adams

The Gesundheit Institute is a pie in the face of greed – by taking the most expensive thing in America, and giving it away for free.

—#—

The most revolutionary act you can commit in our society today is be happy.

—#—

So my advice to old people is, damn it, stand tall and recognize you are the gold, you are the storage of the gold of life. If we’re too stupid to see it in you, then make some noise and make us see it; at least go out there and get involved with the children.
— Interview by ‘Caring People’ Magazine, Spring 1993

Jane Addams

True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.

—#—

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.

—#—

 Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

—#—

Nothing can be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort which might have saved the world.

—#—

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

—#—

In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.

—#—

It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that “Ethics” is but another word for “righteousness,” that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless.

—#—

For action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics.

—#—

In this effort toward a higher morality in our social relations, we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many.

—#—

We stand today united in a belief in beauty, genius, and courage, and that these can transform the world.

Aeschylus

In war, truth is the first casualty.
― 525 BC – 456 BC

Ramona Africa

When Obama ran for president, a lot of people of color, and even some white people, looked at him like a savior. But there is no savior out there; we are our savior. As long as we understand that and got that in our heads, then we’re gonna get somewhere. But if we hallucinate that there is some savior out there that’s going to come along and make things better for us and clear up all the injustices, then that’s just what we’re doing: hallucinating – because it ain’t gonna happen. We have to do that work, we have to do it. Like I said, it ain’t easy, it’s gonna take time and it’s not something that’s gonna happen overnight, but the only way it’s gonna happen is for us to start walking that road.
— at Conspiring for Change

Steven Aitchison

People change for two main reasons: either their minds have been opened or their hearts have been broken.

—#—

If you have the courage to be honest with everyone, including yourself, you may hurt a few people’s feelings, but they will forever value your opinion more than your half truths.

Mitch Albom

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

Alan Alda

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

Robert Alden

There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle.

Alfred Alder

Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.

Shannon L. Alder

The devil lives in the shadow of subtle things those things people keep hidden from others. They reside in the lies they tell themselves, in order to justify their pain or fear. It is the slight, the dig, the silence and the unspoken truth that we minimize to a passive aggressive status, as if it were a lesser evil. Integrity is not subtle. It speaks loudly, so everyone can hear and be healed. It is something you will never have to search for because it is seen and felt.

Alexander the Great

Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.

Muhammad Ali

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.

—#—

If the entire history of mankind were condensed into a single year, our knowledge of how to destroy life on earth with weapons of mass destruction has been acquired in the last thirty seconds. Never again will we lack the knowledge to eliminate the world in a single act of madness. Therefore, we are faced with a dilemma unique in our history. We must not only control the weapons that can kill us, we must bridge the great disparities of wealth and opportunity among the peoples of the world, the vast majority of whom live in poverty without hope, opportunity or choices in life. These conditions are a breeding ground for division that can cause a desperate people to resort to nuclear weapons as a last resort. Our only hope lies in the power of our love, generosity, tolerance and understanding and our commitment to making the world a better place for all…

—#—

My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother or some darker people or some poor, hungry people in the mud for big, powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Poor little black people and babies and children and women. How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.
— In his statement when he refused the to be inducted into the military, April 28, 1967

Woody Allen

If Jesus came back, and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.
— from “Hannah and Her Sisters” 1986 film

Dorothy Allison

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

We are not a homogeneous organization seeking to become more diverse; we are an incomplete organization seeking to become whole.

Martin Ami

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

Joe Ancis

The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.

Allison Anders

I don’t believe you ever get closure on anything. Things leave a permanent mark on you.

Paul Thomas Anderson

We may be through with the past, but the past is never through with us.
— Magnolia (film)

Brian Andreas

Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning & loving the world all over again. That’s what takes a real hero.
— artist & storyteller

Elizabeth Andrew

Volunteers do not necessarily have the time; they just have the heart.

Maya Angelou

If I could give you one thought, it would be to lift someone up. Lift a stranger up — lift her up. I would ask you, mother and father, brother and sister, lovers, mother and daughter, father and son, lift someone. The very idea of lifting someone up will lift you, as well.

—#—

We spend precious hours fearing the inevitable. It would be wise to use that time adoring our families, cherishing our friends, and living our lives.

—#—

You did then what you knew how to do. When you knew better, you did better.

—#—

We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.

—#—

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

—#—

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.

—#—

I think that sometimes we become lethargic out of fear. It’s not really laziness so much as it is timidity. We’d rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of, when in truth the place where one is standing may be untenable, it may be dangerous, it may be stultifying, and it’s better to just step on. You know, you have to move.
— in Angelou – a conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks – with editor Melvin McLeod, Shambhala Sun, January 1998

—#—

Art is not a luxury. The artist is so necessary in our lives. The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked. And when there’s a question asked, there’s an answer somewhere. I don’t believe a question can be asked which doesn’t have an answer somewhere in the universe. That’s what the artist is supposed to do, to liberate us from our ignorance.
— in Angelou – a conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks – with editor Melvin McLeod, Shambhala Sun, January 1998

—#—

You alone are enough and you have nothing to prove to anybody.

—#—

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catchers mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back.

—#—

I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

—#—

When people show you who they are, believe them.

—#—

Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.

—#—

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

—#—

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

—#—

I am convinced that most people do not grow up… We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.
— Letter to My Daughter, 2009

— #—

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

written on the tomb of an Anglican Bishop

When I was young and free and my imagination had no limits, I dreamed of changing the world. As I grew older and wiser, I discovered the world would not change, so I shortened my sights somewhat and decided to change only my country. But it too seemed immovable. As I grew into my twilight years, in one last desperate attempt, I settled for changing only my family, those closest to me, but alas they would have none of it. And now as I lay on my deathbed, I suddenly realize: If I had only changed myself first, then by example I might have changed my family. From their inspiration and encouragement, I would then have been able to better my country and who knows, I may have even changed the world.
— in the Crypts of Westminster Abbey (1100 A.D.)

anonymous

The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.
— African proverb

—#—

I’m not a member of an organized religion.
I’m a Quaker.
— seen on a bumper sticker

—#—

Spes Oritur Ac Tenebras (Latin: Hope Arises From The Darkness)

—#—

You do not get to call yourself an ally. I don’t get to call myself an ally. No one gets to bestow that title upon themself. …
Calling oneself an ally takes away the agency and denies the expertise of targets of oppression in that particular oppression. …
Allyship is a state to work toward, with the understanding that we may never actually reach it.
— Wombat Cascadia — SO YOU WANT TO BE AN ALLY!

—#—

The true measure of a mountain’s greatness is not its height but whether it is charming enough to attract dragons.
— from a Chinese poem

—#—

Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.
— Indian proverb

—#—

Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.
— Serbian proverb

—#—

Either I will find a way or I will make one.
— Latin proverb, most commonly attributed to Hannibal

—#—

The system was never broken. It was built this way.
— a sign from Occupy Wall Street

—#—

An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too.” They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee replied “The one I feed.”

—#—

Oh no honey… karma is a classy and wise elder that will calmly sit you down and serve you a tea you later realize was laced with the same poison you served others for years.

—#—

You can forgive people without welcoming them back into your live. Apology accepted. Access denied.

—#—

Do not cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

—#—

Sometimes cutoff isn’t personal. it is spiritual!

—#—

The moment you put a stop to people taking advantage of you and disrespecting you, is when they define you as difficult, selfish, or crazy. Manipulators hate boundaries.

—#—

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
― attributed to Ernest T. Campbell and to Mark Twain

—#—

If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
― attributed to Marissa Mayer, James Watson, Steven R. Craig, Michael Dell, Lorne Michaels, and others

—#—

God, grant me the patience to work with unjust systems I cannot change today,
the courage to strategically enact progress when I know I can,
and the wisdom to know that, despite structural oppression, I can still make a difference.
Amen
― Serenity Prayer for Our Times – Franciscan Version

Susan B. Anthony

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or not

hing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

—#—

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

Sherry Anderson

Volunteers are not paid — not because they are worthless, but because they are priceless.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.

—#—

Thoroughgoing ignorance about the ways of others is largely a privilege of the powerful.

Fiona Apple

In a letter she posted on Facebook to fans when she cancelled a South American tour because her beloved pitbull Janet was dying:

I know that she’s not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people.
But I know that she is coming close to point where she will stop being a dog, and instead, be part of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.
I just can’t leave her now, please understand.
If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.

Hannah Arendt

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

—#—

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.

—#—

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

—#—

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

—#—

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Joseph Francis Argazzi

Do not surrender your grief. Allow it to transform you.

Barbara Lazear Ascher

I have been trying to make the best of grief and am just beginning to learn to allow it to make the best of me.

—#—

For many of us, grieving is our first experience, since childhood, of being out of control. It is a frightening return to old helplessness and society doesn’t tolerate it for long. The collective conscience speaks: “Get a grip on yourself.” “Get on with it.” But how do we “get a grip” on a self in metamorphosis? We are shedding more than tears, we are shedding skins. How can we “get on with it” when “it” has changed?
— Landscape Without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief

Isaac Asimov

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

—#—

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Margaret Atwood

The Secrets of The Sea: Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
— The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

—#—

In the end, we’ll all become stories.

Augustine of Hippo

You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones.

—#—

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

—#—

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

Marcus Aurelius

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Richard Bach

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.

Charlene Baldridge

We can never know the depth of another’s pain, only be there to listen, to hold, to say how it is with us. When we lose a child to death, the pain never goes away, we simply learn, through practice, how to live in spite of it, or through it, partly by coming together with others who grieve, and partly by expressing our need for hugs and surrounding us with friends who never, ever back away.
—To ache and to bloom

James Baldwin

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

—#—

I imagine that the reason that people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they are afraid that if they let go of the hate, they will have to deal with pain.
— Notes of a Native Son

—#—

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
― The Fire Next Time

—#—

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
It’s very frightening. But the so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.

—#—

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

—#—

Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person – ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
― No Name in the Street, 1972

—#—

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

—#—

There’s nothing in me that is not in everybody else, and nothing in everybody else that is not in me. We’re trapped in language, of course. But “homosexual” is not a noun. At least not in my book… Perhaps a verb. You see, I can only talk about my own life. I loved a few people and they loved me. It had nothing to do with these labels. Of course, the world has all kinds of words for us. But that’s the world’s problem.

—#—

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

—#—

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

—#—

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

—#—

One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

—#—

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
— The Fire Next Time

—#—

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
— from “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961)

— # —

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was before you came in.

—#—

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
To be conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

—#—

I want American history taught. Unless I’m in that book, you’re not in it either. History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

—#—

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
—#—

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

—#—

I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. Love is not a feeling but a power that transforms us and those with whom we interact.

—#—

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
— Notes of a Native Son, 1955

—#—

One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.
― Nothing Personal (1964)

—#—

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

—#—

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

— # —

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.
— The Harlem Ghetto…

—#—

The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.
— Notes on the House of Bondage

—#—

I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.
— A Report from Occupied Territory, The Nation, 1966

—#—

These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.

—#—

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.

—#—

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

—#—

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life, shame, and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
—  Nothing Personal (1964)

—#—

I never have been in despair about the world. Enraged. I cannot afford despair…you can’t tell the children that there is no hope.

Banksy

I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.

—#—

If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.

J.M. Barrie

The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forver to be able to do it.
— in Peter Pan

—#—

All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.
— in Peter Pan

—#—

Never is an awfully long time.
— in Peter Pan

—#—

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

—#—

I’m not young enough to know everything.
― The Admirable Crichton

Kenneth C Barnes

Integrity is one of the virtues for which Quakers in the past have been praised. It is a quality worth having, but it is doubtful if it can be reached by self-conscious effort or by adherence to a principle… Integrity is a condition in which a person’s response to a total situation can be trusted: the opposite of a condition in which he would be moved by opportunist or self-seeking impulses breaking up his unity as a whole being. This condition of trust is different from the recognition that he will always be kind or always tell the truth. The integrity of some Dutch Friends I have met showed itself during the war in their willingness to tell lies to save their Jewish friends from the Gestapo or from starvation.
― 1972

Joan Baez

You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can decide how you’re going to live now.

—#—

If it’s natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?

—#—

Action is the antidote to despair.

—#—

If I weren’t in denial part of the time, it would be too sorrowful to go on.

—#—

If you don’t have music, you have silence. There is power in both.

Lucille Ball

I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.

—#—

I’m not funny. What I am is brave.

—#—

Now get the hell out of here and go change the world.

Steve Basile

Each at their own time, each at their own pace, each in their own way. Coming out is a process, a journey, not a race. Unlike most journeys, there is no one destination in mind, only a direction. Keep on. When you stray, or slow down, don’t be afraid to ask advice or direction. Your journey is yours alone, and regardless of where you end up, or when, don’t let anyone else plan the trip.

Bruce Bawer

Straight Americans need… an education of the heart and soul. They must understand – to begin with – how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.
—The Advocate, April 1998

Joshua Becker

Gratitude is a discipline, not an emotion.

The Belfast, Ireland COVID team

When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself, ‘It looks like the end of the world.’ What you’re seeing is love in action. What you’re seeing, in that negative space, is how much we do care for each other, for our grandparents, our parents, our brothers and sisters, for people we will never meet.

People will lose jobs over this. Some will lose their businesses. And some will lose their lives. All the more reason to take a moment, when you’re out on your walk, or on your way to the store, or just watching the news, to look into the emptiness and marvel at all of that love.

Let it fill you and sustain you. It isn’t the end of the world. It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness.
— March 26, 2020

Yogi Berra

When you see a fork in the road, take it!
— Instructions he gives to visitors to his house. The road forks and both paths end at his front door.

Daniel Berrigan

We spoke out, committed civil disobedience, and went to jail because the peace hangs senselessly and precariously upon weapons costing billions to build and billions to improve — weapons which become more useless as we add to their destructive force. With this money we could have fed the world’s people. Half the children on earth go to bed hungry — millions more have retarding and stunting protein deficiencies. Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.

Maeve Binchy

I don’t have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.


—#—

Nobody is ordinary if you know where to look.

—#—

If you don’t go to a dance you can never be rejected, but you’ll never get to dance either.

—#—

The whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things.

—#—

I think you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt and stop wishing for another hand.

—#—

We get courage from other people’s stories. We get consolation from the way they tell about failures, disappointments and crises. It means that we are not alone.

Anthony Bing

Critics of nonviolent action often state that some resistance produces violence, gives birth to it, even if nonviolent action is intended as a protest against violence. Thus Martin Luther King, Jr., was advised by southern ministers in the city of Birmingham not to take his message to the streets because he would be inciting violence. King replied that it is sometimes the case that violence erupts in the midst of a nonviolence campaign. Gandhi found the same thing to be true. But their contention was that the violence was already present in the structures of the political, social, and economic systems against which nonviolent activists were rebelling. All nonviolence did in those cases was to bring to the surface the violence that was already inherent in unjust situations. As Martin Luther King Jr. moved from civil rights to anti-Vietnam activism, he exposed more and more of the violence in American society. And when in his last year he proposed to fight a nonviolent war against poverty, his Poor People’s Campaign, sealed his fate. When the system felt most attacked, it killed him.
— Professor Emeritus of English and Director of Peace and Global Studies – Earlham College – in his lecture, “Albert Camus: The Plague and an Ethic of Nonviolence”

Wendell Berry

Always in the woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place, there will be along with the feeling of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anyone else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.
— The One Inch Journey

—#—

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

—#—

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

—#—

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
— Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Black Elk

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

Augusto Boal

Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.

Derek Bok

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Erma Bombeck

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything you gave me.”

—#—

Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation’s compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain loving one another.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

—#—

Ten people who speak are more noise than ten-thousand that are silent.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
― The Cost of Discipleship, 1937

John Boonstra

What is the cost of exclusion? What is lost by not having those most affected at the table in the policy discourse? Sound governing, good planning, justice…. Everything, ultimately.

Harry Bosch (fictional character)

There are two kinds of truth, Mads. The kind that comes from darkness, gets bent and manipulated for someone’s self-interest, and the kind you carry inside and know is real.
— Harry Bosch in the BOSCH television series, episode 501: “Two Kinds of Truth” written by Daniel Pyne from source material, Michael Connelly’s novel of the same name.

Holly Boswell

You don’t have a pronoun for me yet.
— transgender activist and author

Ray Bradbury

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

—#—

You don’t have to burn book to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

—#—

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
— Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

Mark Royston Brain

There is no age at which a child is too young to learn that homophobia is wrong.

Georges Braque

Art is a wound turned into light.

Jim Brochu

“I’m trying to love the sinner and hate the sin.” – BUDDY
“Me too. I’m trying to love the bigot and hate the bigotry.” – GIDEON
— Gideon in ‘The Last Session’ ~ book by Jim Brochu, lyrics by Steve Schalchlin, with additional lyrics by John Bettis and Marie Cain

Robert McAfee Brown

How does one keep from “growing old inside”? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

—#—

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

—#—

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.
— The Need for a Moral Minority

—#—

I think we need to create a moral minority that could propose convictions without arrogance, insight without absolutism, commitment but without coercion, and democracy without demagoguery.
— The Need for a Moral Minority

Pearl S. Buck

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

—#—

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.

Gautama Buddha

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

—#—

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

—#—

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

—#—

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

—#—

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Frederick Buechner

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

—#—

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.

—#—

If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.

—#—

Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.

—#—

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

Jimmy Buffett

Grief is like the wake behind a boat. It starts out as a huge wavethat follows close behind you and is big enough to swamp and drown you if you suddenly stop moving forward. But if you do keep moving, the big wake will eventually dissipate. And after a long enough time, the waters of your life get calm again, and that is when the memories of those who have left begin to shine as bright and as enduring as the stars above.
― A Salty Piece of Land

Quentin R. Bufogle

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn’t return my phone calls; the itch I’m unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn’t something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It’s just something I do because not writing, as I’ve found, is so much worse.

—#—

I want an avowed atheist in the White House. When time comes to push that button, I want whoever’s making the decision to understand that once it’s pushed, it’s over. Finito. They’re not gonna have lunch with Jesus. Won’t be deflowering 72 virgins on the great shag carpet of eternity, or reincarnated as a cow. I want someone making that decision who believes life on this Earth isn’t just a dress rehearsal for something better — but the only shot we get.

—#—

If a person has no conscience, it’s called being a sociopath. If a corporation has no conscience, it’s called capitalism.

—#—

If you’re gonna burn a bridge behind you, make sure you’ve crossed it first.

Luis Buñuel

If someone were to prove to me — right this minute — that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn’t change a single aspect of my behavior.

—#—

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

—#—

What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn’t pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it’s as if he didn’t. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery. Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly explains), then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion. And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I’ve chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact.
― My Last Sigh

Edmund Burke

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Danny Burstein

Returning to the show felt like more than just a personal decision; it also felt like a political act. It was signaling unity. Unity with the complete strangers who sit in an audience and unite to speak as one.
For theater isn’t just a form of entertainment; at its best, it is a collective, spiritual experience. It is church for the heart and mind. It is shul for the intellect. A mosque celebrating mankind. It reminds us how beautiful life can be and how fragile it is as well. It helps us form opinions and gain insight into the lives of our fellow humans.
― What Happens Inside a Broadway Theater Can Help Us Heal ― Sept. 24, 2021 ― New York Times Opinion

Jack Butler

We say people learn their language. Not exactly. Language grows in people, is a living being.
― The Story I Cannot Name Without Giving Away the Punchline

—#—

I think most people think language makes poetry, that it’s a refinement, an artifice, a purification. I saw as clearly as I could possibly see that it went at least exactly the opposite way. It’s poetry that has made language.
― The Story I Cannot Name Without Giving Away the Punchline

—#—

Knowing the truth may not always help, but in general it improves the odds.
— The Way Cat Sees It, published in Mud Flat Verse (an anthology) 2023

Judith Butler

No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge — it’s deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights.

James Branch Cabell

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Sid Caesar

Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

John Cage

Not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. Begin anywhere.

—#—

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

—#—

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.
In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

—#—

People who are not artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don’t have time to be inspired.

—#—

Art’s purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

—#—

Theater takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one that this is the case.

—#—

The situation must be yes-and-no, not either-or. Avoid a polar situation.
― quoted in “Pop Art Redefined” by John Russell and Suzi Gablik, 1969, pg. 23

—#—

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.

—#—

The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

—#—

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

—#—

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

—#—

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

—#—

The world is no longer a romantic place; some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don’t let the world win.

—#—

My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

—#—

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

—#—

The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

—#—

Every something is an echo of nothing.

—#—

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

Dom Helder Camara, Dominican priest

When I give food the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.

Julia Cameron

Leap and the net will appear.
— The Artist’s Way

Joseph Campbell

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
— The Power of Myth

—#—

When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

—#—

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

—#—

When you follow your bliss… doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.

—#—

The ultimate dragon is within you.

—#—

Eternity is not the hereafter.. this is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.

—#—

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.

—#—

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.

—#—

The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life.
— The Power of Myth

—#—

Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

—#—

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

—#—

The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.

—#—

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

—#—

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

—#—

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

—#—

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

—#—

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

—#—

We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

—#—

The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

—#—

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

—#—

You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.
— The Hero’s Journey

Albert Camus

I love my country too much to be a nationalist.

—#—

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.

—#—

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

—#—

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

—#—

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

—#—

Great novelists are philosopher-novelists whom write in images instead of arguments.

—#—

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

—#—

My dear,
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
Truly yours,
Albert Camus

—#—

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
— in the preface to The Stranger

George Carlin

Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.

—#—

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.

—#—

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer’s disease where they slowly began to recover other people’s lost memories.

—#—

Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.

—#—

Irony is “a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result.” For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.

—#—

Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

—#—

Our nation was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. So they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could kill the rest of the red Indian people, in order to move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving us a place to take off and drop our atomic bombs on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto for this country oughtta be? “YOU GIVE US A COLOR, WE’LL WIPE IT OUT.”

—#—

Thou shalt not kill. Murder. The fifth commandment. But if you think about it…if you think about it, religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. No, more people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. All you have to do…all you have to do is look at slavery, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the World Trade Center, and you’ll see how seriously the religious folks take “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” The more devout they are…the more devout they are, the more they see murder as negotiable…it’s negotiable. It depends, you know? It depends, it depends on who’s doing the killing, and who’s getting killed.

—#—

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

—#—

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

Hodding Carter

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.

Jimmy Carter

We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

Max Carter

Being opposed to war and violence isn’t about avoiding conflict; it’s about doing what one can to “live in the virtue of that life and power which takes away the occasion of war.”

George Washington Carver

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

Pablo Casals

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.

Carlos Castaneda

Your problem is that you think you have time.

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. This question is one that a very old man asks…Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t it is of no use.

Stokely Carmichael

Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.

Willa Cather

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
— On the Art of Fiction – The Borzoi, 1920

    Catherine the Great

    A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

    Center for Story-based Strategy

    Liberation requires vision. And vision, without imagination, leads us down the path already set for us.

    Dan Chaon

    A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn’t see.
    ― Staying Awake with Dan Chaon

    Harry Chapin

    There is a good tired and there is a bad tired. Ironically enough, bad tired can be the kind of day when you’ve won, but you chased other peoples dreams, you fought other peoples battles, you struggled through other peoples agendas, and when you hit the hay at night, victorious, you twist and turn because somehow it wasn’t your day, it wasn’t your life. Ironically enough, good tired can be a day that you lost everything, but you fought your battles, chased your dreams, lived your day, and when you hit the hay at night you sleep the sleep of the just. You rest easy, and you can say “take me away!”

    Tracy Chapman

    I’ve seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living ordinary lives.

    Cesar Chavez

    You are never strong enough that you don’t need help.

    —#—

    Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak… Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.

    —#—

    Together, all things are possible.

    —#—

    Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.

    —#—

    We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.” You are never strong enough that you don’t need help.

    —#—

    We are confident. We have ourselves. We know how to sacrifice. We know how to work. We know how to combat the forces that oppose us. But even more than that, we are true believers in the whole idea of justice. Justice is so much on our side, that that is going to see us through.

    —#—

    Preservation of one’s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.

    —#—

    The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.

    —#—

    Violence just hurts those who are already hurt…Instead of exposing the brutality of the oppressor, it justifies it.

    G.K. Chesterton

    Fairy tales don’t teach children that monsters exist. Children already know monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children monsters can be destroyed.

    —#—

    I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
    — A Short History of England

    —#—

    A stiff apology is a second insult… The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

    Chinese proverb

    Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.

    Shirley Chisholm

    You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

    —#—

    If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

    —#—

    Service is the rent you pay for room on this earth.

    —#—

    I am literally and figuratively a dark horse.

    —#—

    Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated. that it is invisible because it is so normal.

    —#—

    I am, and always will be a catalyst for change.

    —#—

    When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

    —#—

    We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those that we have of ourselves.

    Margaret Cho

    Silence equals nonexistence. If I don’t raise my voice, it’s like I never existed.

    Pema Chödrön

    Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
    ― The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

    —#—

    To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

    —#—

    Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
    ― When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult

    —#—

    As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
    ― When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

    —#—

    Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

    —#—

    To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
    ― When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

    —#—

    Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.
    ― Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

    —#—

    As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion.

    —#—

    Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.

    Noam Chomsky

    Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope. If you assume there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

    —#—

    Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

    —#—

    If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

    —#—

    An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.
    ― Because We Say So

    Deepak Chopra

    The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

    —#—

    When you make a choice, you change the future.

    —#—

    Anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given.

    Winston Churchill

    We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

    —#—

    Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

    —#—

    If you are going through hell, keep going.

    Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro

    Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. Peacemaking is about being able to recognize in the face of the oppressed our own faces, and in the hands of the oppressors our own hands.

    Peacemaking, like most beautiful things, begins small. Matthew 18 gives us a clear process for making peace with someone who has hurt or offended us; first we are to talk directly with them, not at them or around them . . . Straight talk is counter-cultural in a world that prefers politeness to honesty. In his Rule, Benedict of Nursia speaks passionately about the deadly poison of “murmuring,” the negativity and dissension that can infect community and rot the fabric of love.

    Peacemaking begins with what we can change — ourselves. But it doesn’t end there. We are to be peacemakers in a world riddled with violence. That means interrupting violence with imagination, on our streets and in our world. Peacemaking “that is not like any way the empire brings peace” is rooted in the nonviolence of the cross, where we see a Savior who loves his enemies so much that he died for them.
    ― Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

    Michell C. Clark

    Do not let your empathy for others stop you from maintaining the boundaries that you set to protect yourself.

    Arthur C Clarke

    One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

    —#—

    A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

    —#—

    Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

    Alec Clayton

    The event seems more formal than we are comfortable with. We’re just old-line radicals who prefer rousing with the rabble to hobnobbing with the bigwigs.

    Bill Clayton

    This is not my choice.
    This is not forced upon me.
    This just is.

    Eldridge Cleaver

    If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

    Lucille Clifton

    I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

    —#—

    We cannot create what we can’t imagine.

    —#—

    I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy.

    —#—

    . . . even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties, in my definitions, I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me. Stability comes from inside, not outside.

    —#—

    People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

    Chuck Close

    The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

    Kurt Cobain

    Wanting to be someone you’re not is a waste of the person you are.

    William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

    War is humanity’s most chronic and incurable disease. Said Plato: “Only the dead have seen an end to war.” Historian Will Durant estimated that in all recorded history only twenty-nine years could be described as free of war. And of all centuries, the last set records for bloodletting.
    — War Is the Coward’s Escape from the Problems of Peace from the July/August 2003 issue of Fellowship of Reconciliation magazine

    —#—

    Time and again, truth has proved the first casualty of war. That is because wars need lies to justify them, just as lies often call on violence for their defense. …

    —#—

    All nations make decisions based on self-interest and then defend them in the name of morality.

    —#—

    The first casualty of war is truth, which is why, along with all the dead, wounded, and bereaved, war is always cause for remorse, never for exhilaration. …

    —#—

    Americans are blessed to live in a democracy. In a democracy dissent is not disloyal; what is unpatriotic is subservience.

    —#—

    Apathy in the face of evil is morally unacceptable. Consequently, the sobering, demanding question is not “why abolish nuclear weapons?”? but rather “why not?”

    Leonard Cohen

    Ring the bells that still can ring
    Forget your perfect offering
    There is a crack, a crack in everything
    That’s how the light gets in.
    — lyric from “Anthem”

    —#—

    I can’t run no more
    with that lawless crowd
    while the killers in high places
    say their prayers out loud.
    But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
    a thundercloud
    and they’re going to hear from me.
    — Beautiful Losers (1966)

    —#—

    What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

    I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

    Burnell Cotlon

    … you know how people say you only live once? That’s not the truth. You don’t just live once. You only die once. You live every day. So every day that you live, you have to do something impactful. You’re not just born to fall in love, have a few kids, get a job, pay your bills, grow old and die. That’s not why you’re here. You have to find out why you’re here. And my purpose is easy. It’s service.

    — “After Hurricane Katrina, a grocer rebuilds his community a shop at a time” – StoryCorps, September 22, 2023

    James Bryant Conant

    Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

    Confucius

    To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

    Gregory Corso

    The opposite of poetry is hypocrisy.

    Stephen Covey

    Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.

    —#—

    Instead, I have an abundance mentality: When people are genuinely happy at the successes of others, the pie gets larger.

    —#—

    When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

    —#—

    We see the world, not as it is, but as we are — or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms.

    —#—

    We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people’s definition of you.

    —#—

    Courage isn’t absent of fear, it is the awareness that something else is important.

    —#—

    Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

    —#—

    You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside.

    —#—
    Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. Most people listen with the intent to reply.”
    —#—
    We judge ourselves by our intentions. And others by their actions.

    Bruce Coville

    Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.
    — in the book: Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher

    Creole proverb

    Tell me who you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.

    Quentin Crisp

    Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

    —#—

    If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

    Walter Crowley

    There is another legacy of the Sixties which is often neglected: tens of thousands of individuals who won the revolution at least in their own lives. They live within the system but they are not part of it. They organize their work and existences by their own rules, and have achieved a personal independence of thought, action and moral choice which does not require social sanction. They are free men and women and their examples might be the most subversive influences extant today.
    — Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle

    E.E. Cummings

    To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

    Michael Cunningham

    You can’t find peace by avoiding life.
    — in “The Hours”

    The Dalai Lama

    Compassion and love are not mere luxuries. As the source of both inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.

    —#—

    My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

    —#—

    When you talk you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.

    Dante

    The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

    Erasmus Darwin

    He who allows oppression shares the crime.

    Ram Dass

    We’re all walking each other home.

    —#—

    Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

    Ram Dass and Paul Gorman

    Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response to love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.
    — How Can I Help?

    Angela Davis

    I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

    —#—

    If they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you at night.

    —#—

    We must always attempt to lift as we climb.

    —#—

    In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.

    —#—

    You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

    —#—

    I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy. It’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference. Diversity without structural transformation simply brings those who were previously excluded into a system as racist, as misogynistic, as it was before.

    Catherine Dawdy

    It’s all good‚ except when it’s not.

    Dorothy Day

    Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system.

    —#—

    The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

    —#—

    Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.

    —#—

    I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

    —#—

    Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

    —#—

    We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.

    —#—

    I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.

    —#—

    People say, “What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

    Richard Dawkins

    We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
    — The God Delusion

    Christopher Dawson

    As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

    Dayak proverb (Borneo)

    Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways; but where it is unwilling, it will find a thousand excuses.

    James Dean

    Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.

    Eugene Debs

    When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other’s throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known.

    —#—

    While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.

    Ellen DeGeneres

    In the beginning there was nothing. God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.

    David T. Dellinger

    Lest my way of life sounds puritanical or austere, I always emphasize that in the long run one can’t satisfactorily say no to war, violence, and injustice unless one is simultaneously saying yes to life, love, and laughter.
    ― (August 22, 1915 – May 25, 2004) He wrote this in the Yale class of 1936 fiftieth reunion book in 1986.

    Vine Deloria Jr.

    When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply “Ours.”

    —#—

    Religion is for people who are afraid of Hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.

    —#—

    Never has America lost a war … But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.
    ― Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

    Elizabeth Tipton Derieux

    Tomorrow’s peace must be more than the absence of armed conflict. It must be just, creative and cooperative. The weak must be protected from exploitation, the brutal strong curbed, and a sympathetic appreciation developed for the races of mankind.
    — “The Christian Church In Tomorrow’s World” October 1, 1944 The News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina

    Barbara Deming

    With one hand we say to one who is angry, or to an oppressor, or to an unjust system, ‘Stop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to play, I refuse to obey you, I refuse to cooperate with your demands, I refuse to build the walls and the bombs. I refuse to pay for the guns. With this hand I will even interfere with the wrong you are doing. I want to disrupt the easy pattern of your life.’ But then the advocate of nonviolence raises the other hand. It is raised outstretched — maybe with love and sympathy, maybe not — but always outstretched . . . With this hand we say, ‘I won’t let go of you or cast you out of the human race. I have faith that you can make a better choice than you are making now, and I’ll be here when you are ready. Like it or not, we are part of one another.’
    — Revolution and Equilibrium

    Charles Dickens

    Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
    — Hard Times

    Emily Dickinson

    I dwell in possibility.

    Joan Didion

    I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
    — Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

    —#—

    Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
    — Blue Nights, 2011

    Ani DiFranco

    I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap.

    —#—

    To me, being queer isn’t who you’re sleeping with; it’s just an idea that sexuality isn’t gender-based, that it’s love-based.

    Benjamin Disraeli

    The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but reveal to them their own.

    Annie Dillard

    There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

    Justice William O. Douglas

    Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

    Frederick Douglass

    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. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
    —     1857 treatise on West India Emancipation

    —#—

    The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

    —#—

    It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

    —#—

    It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.

    —#—

    Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

    John Donne

    No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

    A.J. Downey

    When you find people who not only tolerate your quirks but celebrate them with glad cries of “Me too!” be sure to cherish them. Because those weirdos are your tribe.
    ― Cutter’s Hope

    Andrea Dworkin

    Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

    Bob Dylan

    May you have a strong foundation when the winds of change shift.

    —#—

    Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. It’s about creating yourself.

    Amelia Earhart

    Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

    Steve Earle

    The idea that murder victims’ families are best served by continuing the cycle of violence is something that I consider to be not only a lie, but criminally negligent. You lie to victims’ families when you tell them they’re going to receive closure if they participate in the process and witness the execution of a human being.

    Thomas Edison

    I have had a lot of success with failure.

    —#—

    Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

    —#—

    Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

    —#—

    Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

    Elizabeth Edwards

    If you know someone who has lost a child and you’re afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died — you’re not reminding them. They didn’t forget. What you’re reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived … and that is a great, great gift.

    —#—

    If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was ‘over it’. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breathe and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before.

    Max Ehrman

    You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
    — Desiderata (1927)

    Albert Einstein

    The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms— this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.
    — in Living Philosophies, 1931

    —#—

    Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

    —#—

    Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

    —#—

    If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

    —#—

    Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

    —#—

    Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

    —#—

    There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.

    —#—

    A person experiences life as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison, and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.

    —#—

    From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

    —#—

    You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

    —#—

    Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.

    —#—

    Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of mankind.

    —#—

    I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

    —#—

    We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created the problem.

    —#—

    The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

    —#—

    Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

    —#—

    Imagination is more important than knowledge.

    —#—

    If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

    —#—

    The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

    —#—

    If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, of what then is an empty desk a sign?

    —#—

    Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

    —#—

    Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.

    —#—

    If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

    —#—

    I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.

    —#—

    Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order — in short, of government.
    — On Peace 

    Adapted from Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower

    As the old man walked the beach at dawn, he noticed a young man ahead of him picking up starfish and flinging them into the sea. Finally catching up with the youth, he asked him why he was doing this. The answer was that the stranded starfish would die if left until the morning sun. “But the beach goes on for miles and there are millions of starfish,” countered the other. “How can your effort make any difference?” The young man looked at the starfish in his hand and then threw it to safety in the waves. “It makes a difference to this one,” he said.

    Dwight D. Eisenhower

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
    — US general & Republican politician (1890 – 1969)

    —#—

    I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

    —#—

    Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

    Gordon Eklund

    Why had I been given a brain if I could not make use of it.
    — Moby, Too (1973)

    T.S. Eliot

    Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

    —#—

    I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.

    —#—

    To Laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

    —#—

    When it is dark enough you can see the stars.

    —#—

    The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.

    —#—

    A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. ? ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
    — Self-Reliance (1841)

    —#—

    What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

    —#—

    The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

    —#—

    I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

    —#—

    Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

    —#—

    The only way to have a friend is to be one.

    —#—

    The great teacher is not the man who supplies the most facts, but the one in whose presence we become different people.

    The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

    Nora Ephron

    Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally.
    — Keynote speech to Wellesley graduates in 1996

    —#—

    What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands.
    — Keynote speech to Wellesley graduates in 1996

    —#—

    Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives.
    — Keynote speech to Wellesley graduates in 1996

    Louise Erdrich

    Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
    ― The Painted Drum

    —#—

    Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it’s going to help a situation is always wrong.

    —#—

    Women’s rights are just a watery paint on the walls of history. We must not forget.
    — Inside the Dystopian Visions of Margaret Atwood and Louise Erdrich, ELLE, December 2017

    Erik Erikson

    Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.

    Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

    Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

    Rachel Held Evans

    On a given Sunday morning I might spot six or seven people who have wronged or hurt me, people whose politics, theology, or personalities drive me crazy. The church is positively crawling with people who don’t deserve to be here…starting with me.But the table can transform even our enemies into companions. The table reminds us that, as brothers and sisters adopted into God’s family and invited to God’s banquet, we’re stuck with each other; we’re family. We might as well make peace. The table teaches us that faith isn’t about being right or good ot in agreement. Faith is about feeding and being fed…The church is God saying: “I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”
    — On Any Given Sunday

    Dr. Anthony Fauci

    I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care for other people.

    William Faulkner

    Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
    — Light in August

    —#—

    Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.

    Leslie Feinberg

    I live proudly in a body of my own design. I defend my right to be complex.
    — transgender activist and author

    Christopher Ferry

    Heal. Because we have children who don’t deserve the broken version of us.

    Carolyn Fields

    Although we generally think of community in terms of what binds participants together — shared norms, beliefs, and values — communities of difference are based not on homogeneity but on respect for difference and on the absolute regard for the intrinsic worth of every individual. Members of such communities do not begin with a dominant set of established norms but develop these norms together, with openness and respect, as they share their diverse perspectives.

    Harvey Fierstein

    Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself.
    — A 12-Step Program Guaranteed to Change your Life – his commencement speech to the Bennington College class of 1992

    —#—

    Change your mind as often as possible. Just because you thought something yesterday doesn’t mean you have to think it today. Don’t ever become a prisoner of your own opinion.

    —#—

    If you deny yourself commitment, what can you do with your life?

    Corey Fischer

    It is not normal for the leaders of a great democracy to turn against one of the most basic human impulses: the creation of art. Historically, all societies that have done so have been equally hostile to any expression of human freedom. This animus toward art is often couched in the argument that in the absence of government support, the market will best determine what kind of art should be nurtured. In fact, the market supports art that is marketable. Such art may be of high quality. It may satisfy our needs for entertainment or diversion. But art-as-product rarely provokes, challenges or innovates.
    — Wounded in the culture wars

    Emily Flake

    I guess I could just lean into the weirdness of what I’ve become.
    ― Visions of the Post-Pandemic Future – April 5, 2021 – The New Yorker

    Abraham Flexner

    Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
    — Educator (1866-1959)

    Bishop Yvette Flunder

    I think it is critically important that all Christians and all people of faith show their love not by making access to God and to good exclusionary, but to seek to be inclusionary essentially to make the table of the lord as we say in the Christian church available to everyone. And when we don’t know exactly what to do, let’s err on the side of putting more chairs at the table and making the table larger and longer and bigger until everyone has a place.
    — City of Refuge, United Church of Christ in Lead with Love

    Jane Fonda

    We’re still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That’s the old metaphor: You’re born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude. … A more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase. The upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity.
    — Life’s Third Act | TED Talk | December 2011

    Malcolm S. Forbes

    Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

    George Fox

    You shall say, ‘Christ sayest this’, ‘The Apostles sayest this’, but what doth thou say?
    — founder of the Religious Society of Friends

    Pope Francis

    Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun does not shine on itself and flowers do not spread their fragrence for themselves. Living for others is a rule of nature. We are all born to help each other. No matter how difficult it is… Life is good when you are happy; but much better when others are happy because of you.

    Anne Frank

    How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

    —#—

    It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must hold up my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

    Barney Frank

    Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight.

    Victor Frankl

    Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds meaning.

    Michael Franti & Spearhead

    From the tops of the buildings to the streets below
    Between the Wall Street banks and the empty homes
    Between the lines of the people standing all in a row
    There’s a crack in the gutter where a flower grows
    Reminding me that everything is possible
    — “Hey Hey Hey” – The Sound of Sunshine

    The Fray

    Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.
    — “All At Once”

    Paulo Freire

    Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply “blah, blah, blah,” and practice, pure activism.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    The teacher who really teaches, that is, who really works with contents within the context of methodological exactitude, will deny as false the hypocritical formula, ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ Whoever is engaged in ‘right thinking’ knows only too well that words not given body (made flesh) have little or no value. Right thinking is right doing.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    Hope is a natural, possible, and necessary impetus in the context of our unfinishedness.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    If I am a product of genetic, cultural, or class determination, I have no responsibility for my action in this world and, therefore, it is impossible for me to speak of ethics. Of course, this assumption of responsibility does not mean that we are not conditioned genetically, culturally, and socially. It means that we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    Washing ones hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

    —#—

    But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or sub oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradiction of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them to be men is to be oppressors.

    Robert Frost

    The only way out is to go through.

    Elizabeth Fry

    I believe there is something in the mind, or in the heart, that shows its approbation when we do right. I give myself this advice: Do not fear truth, let it be so contrary to inclination and feeling. Never give up the search after it: and let me take courage, and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates, if it leads me to be a Quaker or not.
    — 1780-1845

    —#—

    I believe there is something in the mind, or in the heart, that shows its approbation when we do right. I give myself this advice: Do not fear truth, let it be so contrary to inclination and feeling. Never give up the search after it: and let me take courage, and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates, if it leads me to be a Quaker or not.

    William Fulbright

    The rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared and condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognized as the essential bond for a peaceful world.

    Robert Fulghum

    Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.

    Richard Buckminster Fuller

    You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

    —#—

    Either war is obsolete, or men are.

    —#—

    How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

    —#—

    If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

    —#—

    People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

    —#—

    We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

    —#—

    We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

    —#—

    When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

    —#—

    Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

    —#—

    Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.

    —#—

    There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

    —#—

    Man knows so much and does so little.

    —#—

    Love is metaphysical gravity.

    —#—

    I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.

    —#—

    I’m not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.

    —#—

    There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

    —#—

    Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.

    —#—

    When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

    —#—

    In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.

    Neil Gaiman

    Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

    —#—

    Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.
    — The Ocean at the End of the Lane

    Ernest Gaines

    Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

    Eduardo Galeano

    I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.

    —#—

    Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
    — The Nobodies

    Game of Thrones

    The past is already written. The ink is dry.
    — Three-eyed Raven in “Oathbreaker” – Season 6 / Episode 3

    Violence is a disease. You don’t cure a disease by spreading it to more people. 
    — Brother Ray in “The Broken Man” – Season 6 / Episode 7

    Indira Gandhi

    My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

    Mohandas K. Gandhi

    You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

    —#—

    I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides, and my windows to be closed. Instead, I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

    What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

    —#—

    I think it would be a good idea.
    — His reply when a reporter asked what he thought of Western civilization.

    —#—

    It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us. This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say.

    —#—

    Violent means will give violent freedom.

    —#—

    I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

    —#—

    However much I may sympathize with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.

    —#—

    What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

    —#—

    What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated?

    —#—

    It may be long before the law of love will be recognized in international affairs. The machinery’s of government stand between and hide the hearts of one people from those of another.

    —#—

    Democracy and violence can ill go together. Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side.

    —#—

    Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.

    —#—

    Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.

    —#—

    Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.

    —#—

    An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

    —#—

    Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

    —#—

    You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

    —#—

    It is as much our obligation not to cooperate with evil as it is to cooperate with good.

    —#—

    Unity, to be real, must stand the severest strain without breaking.

    —#—

    Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.

    —#—

    The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – that is where the battle should be fought.

    —#—

    I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills.

    —#—

    Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.

    Mohandas K. Gandhi and son Arun Gandhi and Steven W. Gilbert

    Gandhi’s “Seven Blunders of the World” that Lead to Violence… + 5
    Mohandas Gandhi gave his list of “Seven Blunders of the World” that lead to violence to his grandson Arun Gandhi shortly before his assassination. The list was then first published in the Christian Science Monitor (February 1, 1995: pg 14).

    Wealth without work
    Pleasure without conscience
    Knowledge without character
    Commerce without morality
    Science without humanity
    Worship without sacrifice
    Politics without principle

    Arun Gandhi added:

    Rights without responsibilities

    Four more were added by Steven W. Gilbert, Director of Technology Projects at the American Association for Higher Education, and founder and president of The Teaching, Learning, and Technology (TLT) Group focus on the relationship between learning, teaching, and technology:

    Technology without direction
    Connection without community
    Teaching without joy
    Learning without hope

    Gangaji

    Under the anger, under the fear, under the despair, under the broken heartedness, there is a radiance that has never been harmed, that has never been lost, that is the truth of who one is. 

    Arne Garborg

    It is said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not knowledge, but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; leisure, but not peace. You can have the husk of everything, but not the kernel.

    —#—

    To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart, And to sing it to them when they have forgotten.

    Robert Gardner

    I suppose I should wish you success, but that is really easy. I would like to wish you something that is harder to come by. So I am going to wish you meaning in life. And meaning is not something you stumble across like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of human kind as it is passed on to you; out of your own talent and understanding, out of things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, Then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

    Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom. But sharing data is the first step toward community.

    Marvin Gaye

    War is not the answer, because only love can conquer hate.

    Jean Genet

    A collage of a person and a quote Description automatically generatedJean Genet – Quote from his 1956 play “The Balcony”

    If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
    ― “The Balcony” (play, 1956)

    Ricky Gervais

    I think life is precious ’cause you can’t watch it again. I mean, you can believe in an afterlife if that makes you feel better. Doesn’t mean it’s true. But once you realize you’re not gonna be around forever, I think that’s what makes life so magical. One day you’ll… eat your last meal, smell your last flower, hug your friend for the very last time. You might not know it’s the last time. So that’s why you should do everything you love with passion, you know? Treasure the few years you’ve got because… that’s all there is.
    — Ricky Gervais as Tony in “After Life” Episode #1.6 (TV Episode 2019)

    —#—

    There’s that lovely thing, “A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never sit in.” Good people do things for other people, that’s it – the end.
    — Penelope Wilton as Anne in “After Life” Episode #1.6 (TV Episode 2019)

    —#—

    Happiness is amazing, it’s so amazing it doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not.
    — Penelope Wilton as Anne in “After Life” Episode #1.6 (TV Episode 2019)

    Ritu Ghatourey

    Be selective in your battles. Sometimes peace is better than being right.

    Thomas Gibson

    Moving on is not closure. It’s not neat, and it’s not about turning the page. It is about moving on, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve left something behind.

    Kahlil Gibran

    Your children are not your children.
    They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
    They come through you, but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
    You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.
    You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
    You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
    For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
    You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
    The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
    Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness, For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
    — in “The Prophet” (1923)

    Andre Gide

    It is better to be hated for what one is than loved for what one is not.

    Candace Gingrich

    Most times, the only gay or lesbian face people know of is who they see in the pride parade. To judge us on that would be like judging heterosexuals after watching Mardi Gras.

    Elizabeth Gilbert

    Creation is the antidote of despair.

    —#—

    Let me list for you some of the many ways in which you might be afraid to live a more creative life: You’re afraid you have no talent. You’re afraid you’ll be rejected or criticized or ridiculed or misunderstood or—worst of all—ignored. You’re afraid there’s no market for your creativity, and therefore no point in pursuing it. You’re afraid somebody else already did it better. You’re afraid everybody else already did it better. You’re afraid somebody will steal your ideas, so it’s safer to keep them hidden forever in the dark. You’re afraid you won’t be taken seriously. You’re afraid your work isn’t politically, emotionally, or artistically important enough to change anyone’s life. You’re afraid your dreams are embarrassing. You’re afraid that someday you’ll look back on your creative endeavors as having been a giant waste of time, effort, and money. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of discipline. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of work space, or financial freedom, or empty hours in which to focus on invention or exploration. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of training or degree. You’re afraid you’re too fat. (I don’t know what this has to do with creativity, exactly, but experience has taught me that most of us are afraid we’re too fat, so let’s just put that on the anxiety list, for good measure.) You’re afraid of being exposed as a hack, or a fool, or a dilettante, or a narcissist. You’re afraid of upsetting your family with what you may reveal. You’re afraid of what your peers and coworkers will say if you express your personal truth aloud. You’re afraid of unleashing your innermost demons, and you really don’t want to encounter your innermost demons. You’re afraid your best work is behind you. You’re afraid you never had any best work to begin with. You’re afraid you neglected your creativity for so long that now you can never get it back. You’re afraid you’re too old to start. You’re afraid you’re too young to start. You’re afraid because something went well in your life once, so obviously nothing can ever go well again. You’re afraid because nothing has ever gone well in your life, so why bother trying? You’re afraid of being a one-hit wonder. You’re afraid of being a no-hit wonder.
    ― Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

    Allen Ginsberg

    Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.

    Jeanne Giordano

    You can’t scare me; I was picketing before you were born.

    Nikki Giovanni

    There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.

    —#—

    Mistakes are a fact of life: It is the response to the error that counts.

    Ira Glass

    Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

    Hermann Goering

    The Nazi party leader was interviewed by Gustave Gilbert during the Easter recess of the Nuremberg trials, April 18, 1946, and is quoted in Gilbert’s book ‘Nuremberg Diary.’

    Goering: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

    Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

    Goering: Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

    —#—

    Education is dangerous. Every educated person is a future enemy.

    Ronald Gold

    The diagnosis of homosexuality as a “disorder” is a contributing factor to the pathology of those homosexuals who do become mentally ill…. Nothing is more likely to make you sick than being constantly told that you are sick.

    Jeff Goldblum

    You were so busy trying to see if you could do it that you didn’t stop to think about whether you should.
    —in Jurassic Park

    Whoopi Goldberg

    Normal is in the eye of the beholder.

    —#—

    Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine.

    Emma Goldman

    The most violent element in society is ignorance.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    When we can’t dream any longer we die.

    —#—

    The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.

    —#—

    The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardor and faith in some supreme deed, have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

    —#—

    If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

    Barry Goldwater

    Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternative.
    — Conservative Politician, Former Arizona Senator and Governor, 1981 speech

    Paul Goodman

    Confusion is the state of promise, the fertile void where surprise is possible again. Confusion is in fact the state we are in, and we should be wise to cultivate it.
    — Growing Up Absurd

    Alexander John Goodrum

    Diversity is not for the squeamish. It means making (and taking) a space at the table that includes people you don’t like, don’t agree with, or who you think are just plain wrong.
    — disabled African-American bisexual FTM transsexual activist, 1960-2002

    Ruth Gordon

    Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.
    — L’Officiel magazine, Summer 1980.
    —#—
    Courage is like a strain of yoghurt culture, if you have some you can have some more.
    — (1980) in “Ruth Gordon, an open book”
    —#—
    Acting is the use of human experience with talent added.
    — (1980) in “Ruth Gordon, an open book”
    —#—
    Despair is your friend in show business. I don’t believe you can act if happiness is your lot. It’s the ups that keep you living and the downs that mete out talent.
    — (1980) in “Ruth Gordon, an open book”
    —#—

    Life is getting through the moment. The philosopher William James says to cultivate the cheerful attitude. Now nobody had more trouble than he did — except me. I had more trouble in my life than anybody. But your first big trouble can be a bonanza if you live through it. Get through the first trouble, you’ll probably make it through the next one.

    John Green

    Grief does not change you. It reveals you.

    John Mark Green

    You are not the darkness you endured.
    You are the light that refused to surrender.

    —#—

    The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets.

    —#—

    Sometimes the only way to get closure is by accepting that you’ll never get it.

    —#—

    You are the artist,
    and your days
    the canvas.
    Will you create
    an original
    masterpiece,
    or live a
    paint-by-numbers
    kind of life?

    Rayna Green

    By the time they reach second grade, every child in the country knows what an Indian is. They wear lots of feathers, ride spotted ponies and shoot arrows. Indians who don’t fit the type are invisible; they simply can’t be imagined by the majority of white children or adults.
    — writer, college professor and Director of the American Indian Program at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, of German and Cherokee descent

    Vivian Greene

    Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.

    Glenn Greenwald

    Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of government power. If people are able to operate in the dark, it is not likely or probable, but inevitable that they will abuse their power. It’s just human nature. And that’s been understood for as long as politics has existed. That transparency is really the only guarantee that we have for checking those who exercise power.
    And that’s the reason why the government has progressively destroyed one institution after the next designed to bring transparency, whether it’s the media that they turned into the supine creatures or the Congress that does more to empower government secrecy than any other, or the courts that have been incredibly subservient towards sources of government secrecy. One of the only avenues we have left for learning what people in power do are whistleblowers. People who essentially step out and risk their individual liberty, and that’s why there’s such a war being waged against them.
    — In a Bill Moyers interview on Boston Marathon bombing: Talking to the PBS host about civil liberties, terrorism, US foreign policy and the dangers of secrecy. April 26, 2013

    Stephen Grosz

    Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.
    ― The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

    Terri Guillemets

    The world is hugged by the faithful arms of volunteers.

    Woody Guthrie

    Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.

    —#—

    I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim. Too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my very last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

    Mira Hadlow

    Before you silence yourself to keep the peace, ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that can happen if I use my voice?” Usually the answer is “this person may dislike me.” That’s it.

    If you are silencing yourself for this reason, they already don’t like you. They only like a fictional version of you.

    Raise your voice.

    Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī
    — Persian poet aka Hafez or Hafiz

    The words you speak become the house you live in.

    —#—

    I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

    —#—

    Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living In better conditions.

    Edward Everett Hale

    I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.

    —#—

    Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there’s a big difference between “being a writer” and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. “You’ve got to want to write,” I say to them, “not want to be a writer.”
    The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.

    Paulo Freire

    The oppressor is always damaged by believing and treating others as less than fully human. Always.

    Alex Haley

    Find the good — and praise it.

    Thich Nhat Hanh

    Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with the truth.

    —#—

    We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

    —#—

    In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

    —#—

    People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

    —#—

    Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

    —#—

    When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look into the reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

    —#—

    And once we have the condition of peace and joy in us, we can afford to be in any situation. Even in the situation of hell, we will be able to contribute our peace and serenity. The most important thing is for each of us to have some freedom in our heart, some stability in our heart, some peace in our heart. Only then will we be able to relieve the suffering around us.

    —#—

    Peace is all around us. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.

    —#—

    Often, we feel that we need a leader outside of ourselves –a Buddha, a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.– to show the way. But we have the Buddha inside of us. We have Gandhi and King inside of us as well. We are interconnected. We don’t need to wait for some other person to be the change we want to see in the world.

    —#—

    If we take the time to look deeply, we see that understanding and compassion arise from suffering. Understanding is the understanding of suffering, and compassion is the kind of energy that can transform suffering. If suffering is not there, we have no means to cultivate our understanding and our compassion. This is something quite simple to see.

    If you come to Plum Village in the summertime, you see many lotus flowers. Without the mud the lotus flowers cannot grow. You cannot separate lotus flowers from the mud. It is the same with understanding and love. These are two kinds of flowers that grow on the ground of suffering.

    I would not like to send my children to a place where there is no suffering, because I know that in such a place my children will have no chance to develop their compassion and understanding. I don’t know whether my friends who come from the background of Christianity or Judaism can accept this—that in the Kingdom of God there is suffering—but in Buddhist teaching it is clear that suffering and happiness inter-are. Where there is no suffering there is no happiness either. We know from our own experiences that it is impossible to cultivate more understanding and compassion if suffering isn’t there. It is with the mud that we can make flowers. It is with the suffering that we can make compassion and understanding.
    — New Year’s Eve Dharma Talk on December 31, 2005

    —#—

    You are not an observer, you are a participant.

    —#—

    When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That is the message he is sending.

    —#—

    Bhikkhus, the teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon.
    The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore. The raft is needed, but the raft is not the other shore. An intelligent person would not carry the raft around on his head after making it across to the other shore. Bhikkhus, my teaching is the raft which can help you cross to the other shore beyond birth and death. Use the raft to cross to the other shore, but don’t hang onto it as your property. Do not become caught in the teaching. You must be able to let it go.
    ― Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

    —#—

    We can’t wait any longer to restore our relationship with the Earth because right now the Earth and everyone on Earth is in real danger. When a society is overcome by greed and pride, there is violence and unnecessary devastation. When we perpetrate violence toward our own and other species, we’re being violent toward ourselves at the same time. When we know how to protect all beings, we will be protecting ourselves. A spiritual revolution is needed if we’re going to confront the environmental challenges that face us.

    Carol Hanisch

    The personal is political.

    David Harris

    There’s lots of fear, and the issue isn’t whether or not you’re scared. The issue is what you do after you’re scared.
    ― co-founder of ‘The Resistance’ in the film, “The Boys Who Said No”

    —#—

    Evil is a participatory phenomenon. It counts on participation to be successful. The option you have is to withdraw your participation. From there it’s all liberation, whatever the cost.
    ― co-founder of ‘The Resistance’ in the film, “The Boys Who Said No”

    Joanne Harris

    I’m not sure what the theme of my homily today ought to be. Do I want to speak of the miracle of our Lord’s divine transformation? Not really, no. I don’t want to talk about his divinity. I’d rather talk about his humanity. I mean, you know, how he lived his life on earth: his kindness, his tolerance. Listen, here is what I think. I think we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.
    — This was the young priest Pere Henri’s Easter Sunday sermon at the end of the film “Chocolat” (2000) based on the book by Joanne Harris.

    Kamala  Harris

    I think that sadly over the last many years, there’s been this kind of perverse approach to what strength looks like, which is to suggest that the measure of one’s strength is based on who you beat down, instead of what we know: the true measure of your strength is based on who you lift up.
    — in an April 29, 2024 interview on The Drew Barrymore Show, “Vice President Kamala Harris on Becoming “Momala” to Her Husband’s Kids”

    Dag Hammarskjöld

    Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?

    Vaclav Havel

    I am really not an optimist because not all is right in the world. I am really not a pessimist because not all is wrong in the world. I do, however, cultivate hope in my heart as an antidote for cynicism, apathy, malaise, and hopelessness.

    Stephen Hawking

    The greatest enemy of knowledge isn’t the ignorance of knowledge but the illusion of it.

    Audrey Hepburn

    Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being’s suffering. Nothing—not career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we’re going to survive with dignity.

    Gerald K. Hibbert

    May we never forget that our Public Worship is a corporate act: we meet, not as isolated individuals, but as a group. In the silence we enter into fellowship not only with God, but with one another. Our hearts go out one to another, we sense another’s need and realize our common sharing in “the bundle of life “, and so – whether in silence or in speech- we bear one another’s burdens and can speak to one another’s condition.

    Colin Higgins

    I like to watch things grow. They GROW, and FADE, and BLOOM and die and…. turn into something else…. Ah, LIFE!
    — Spoken by Ruth Gordon as Maude in the film “Harold and Maude”, 1971
    —#—
    A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life.
    — Spoken by Ruth Gordon as Maude in the film “Harold and Maude”, 1971
    —#—
    My body is on the earth, but my head is in the stars.
    — Spoken by Ruth Gordon as Maude in the film “Harold and Maude”, 1971

    Robert A. Heinlein

    When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it’s subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man, the most you can do is kill him.

    Lillian Hellman

    Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

    Becky Hendrick

              The dangers are that ‘art business’ can absorb the ‘art’ just like our ‘economic life’ has, in many cases, cancelled out or replaced ‘life.’ And young artists, unless they have been conditioned to see through and resist myths, perceive art as the business — hype, promotion, ‘career.’ 
                  Wendell Berry talks about this vis a vis literature — and someone has said (and I believe) that you can’t hold thoughts of art and money at the same time. The ‘art’ of the 80s is about the 80s, about $, greed, short-term profit, excess. Trump! Junk Bonds!    
                  Just as the religious right’s attack on art is about politics and power, not art.

    Jimi Hendrix

    When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

    Herman Hesse

    If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.

    Jim Hightower

    The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

    —#—

    The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

    —#—

    If you don’t speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?

    —#—

    Politics isn’t about left versus right; it’s about top versus bottom.

    bell hooks

    Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. Most of us are unclear about what to do to protect and strengthen caring bonds when our self-centered needs are not being met.

    —#—

    If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

    —#—

    Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

    —#—

    I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.
    — in Angelou – a conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks – with editor Melvin McLeod, Shambhala Sun, January 1998

    —#—

    It is necessary to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist — the potential victim within that we must rescue — otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.
    — Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

    —#—

    … in terms of thinking about the larger meaning of compassion. I feel I’m always trying to address the question of not dividing people into oppressors and oppressed, but trying to see the potential in all of us to occupy those two poles, and knowing that we have to believe in the capacity of someone else to change towards that which is enhancing of our collective well-being. Or we just condemn people to stay in place.
    — in Angelou – a conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks – with editor Melvin McLeod, Shambhala Sun, January 1998

    —#—

    To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

    —#—

    Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

    —#—

    I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.

    —#—

    Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.
    — All about Love

    Hope for Peace & Justice

    Our values are simple. The journey is not.

    A Hopi Prayer

    Do not stand at my grave and weep
    I am not there,
    I do not sleep.
    I am a thousand winds that blow.
    I am the diamond glints on snow.
    I am the sunlight
    On the ripened grain.
    I am the gentle Autumn’s rain.
    When you awaken in the morning hush,
    I am the swift uplifting rush
    of quiet birds in circled flight.
    I am the soft stars that shine at night.
    Do not stand at my grave and cry.
    I am not there.
    I did not die.
    My Spirit is still alive…

    Khaled Hosseini

    But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

    Jane Howard

    Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
    — Families

    Dolores Huerta

    Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.

    —#—

    If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.

    —#—

    Giving kids clothes and food is one thing but it’s much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important, and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.

    Felicity Huffman

    I know as actors our job is to usually shed our skins. But I think as people, our job is to become who we really are, and so I would like to salute the men and women who brave ostracism, alienation, and a life on the margins to become who they really are.
    — acceptance speech as best actress in her role as a transgender woman in drama “Transamerica” at the 63rd Annual Golden Globe Awards on 1/16/06

    Charles Evans Hughes

    When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

    Victor Hugo

    There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and this is an idea whose time has come.

    Jonathan Lockwood Huie

    Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace. 

    Zora Neale Hurston

    Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the Sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

    —#—

    Prayer seems to be a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down.

    I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out “how long?” to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime.

    It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of the morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me.

    I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space.

    Why fear? The stuff of my being is the matter, ever-changing, ever-moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe does not need finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

    — from her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road

    Robert Hutchins

    The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

    Aldous Huxley

    Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

    —#—

    One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

    —#—

    After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

    Julian Huxley

    Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

    Howard Ikemoto 

    When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”

    Daniel K. Inouye

    History provides no guarantees on the shape of things to come. The possibilities for good and evil remain essentially today, as they have always been, as numerous as the stars. Yet, if there is anything about which I am absolutely certain, it is that within each of us lies the power to transform the world for the better. Let there be no doubt as to the ability of well-meaning individuals to change life’s odds and to influence his or her own destiny along a positive course. I believe most passionately that in each one of you lies a Jefferson, a Lincoln, an Eleanor Roosevelt, a Mother Teresa, and a Martin Luther King, Jr. None of these great men and women accepted the failures and inequities of the world in which they were born, and neither should you! They believed in the perfectibility of the world in which they lived and would not be turned away from what they knew was good, what was right, and what was just.

    Irish proverb

    It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.

    John Irving

    When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feelings that she’s gone, forever–there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
    — A Prayer For Owen Meany

    Molly Ivins

    I still believe in Hope – mostly because there’s no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

    —#—

    The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

    —#—

    What you need is sustained outrage…there’s far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

    —#—

    I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.

    William James

    Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

    Thomas Jefferson

    Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as manners and opinions change, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

    —#—

    If there be one principle more deeply written than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

    —#—

    All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

    —#—

    Dissent is the purest form of patriotism.

    —#—

    The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

    —#—

    Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.

    —#—

    The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

    —#—

    If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.

    Penn Jillette

    Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else’s vision.
    — the larger, louder half of comedy-magic team Penn & Teller

    Steve Jobs

    Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
    — in a commencement address delivered to Stanford University on June 12, 2005

    —#—

    Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
    — in a commencement address delivered to Stanford University on June 12, 2005

    —#—

    The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
    — in a commencement address delivered to Stanford University on June 12, 2005

    —#—

    I want to put a ding in the universe.

    Samuel Johnson

    Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.

    Sonia Johnson

    It’s funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have ‘lifestyles’.

    Angelina Jolie

    Someday you will be faced with the reality of loss. And as life goes on, days rolling into nights, it will become clear that you never really stop missing someone special who’s gone, you just learn to live around the gaping hole of their absence.
    When you lose someone you can’t imagine living without, your heart breaks wide open, and the bad news is you never completely get over the loss. You will never forget them. However, in a backward way, this is also the good news. They will live on in the warmth of your broken heart that doesn’t fully heal back up, and you will continue to grow and experience life, even with your wound.
    It’s like breaking an ankle that never heals perfectly, and that still hurts when you dance, but you dance anyway with a slight limp, and this limp just adds to the depth of your performance and the authenticity of your character.
    The people you lose remain a part of you. Remember them and always cherish the good moments spent with them.

    Cleve Jones

    A movement that seeks to advance only its own members is going to accomplish little.
    — Corporate Money Has Too Much Influence on LGBT Movement – April 4, 2012

    Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

    Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.

    —#—

    I’m not a lady, I’m a hellraiser.

    —#—

    You must stand for free speech in the streets.

    —#—

    Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.

    —#—

    I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

    —#—

    I was born in revolution.

    Micky ScottBey Jones

    Invitation to Brave Space

    Together we will create brave space
    Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
    We exist in the real world
    We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
    In this space
    We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
    We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
    We call each other to more truth and love
    We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
    We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
    We will not be perfect.
    This space will not be perfect.
    It will not always be what we wish it to be
    But
    It will be our brave space together,
    and
    We will work on it side by side.

    Robert Jones, Jr.

    We can disagree and still love each other … unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
    — August 18, 2015 @SonofBaldwin (Note: This quote is often attributed to James Baldwin, but it is not his.)

    Erica Jong

    And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

    June Jordan

    We are the ones we have been waiting for.
    — Poem for South African Women

    Carl Jung

    Learn all your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.

    —#—

    I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

    —#—

    If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

    Jolie Justus

    I always say, if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

    More quotes in the collection: K-M / N-Z

    Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

    —#—

    I imagine that the reason that people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they are afraid that if they let go of the hate, they will have to deal with pain.
    — Notes of a Native Son

    —#—

    Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
    ― The Fire Next Time

    —#—

    Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
    It’s very frightening. But the so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.

    —#—

    The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

    —#—

    Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person – ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
    ― No Name in the Street, 1972

    —#—

    To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

    —#—

    There’s nothing in me that is not in everybody else, and nothing in everybody else that is not in me. We’re trapped in language, of course. But “homosexual” is not a noun. At least not in my book… Perhaps a verb. You see, I can only talk about my own life. I loved a few people and they loved me. It had nothing to do with these labels. Of course, the world has all kinds of words for us. But that’s the world’s problem.

    —#—

    Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

    —#—

    Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

    —#—

    Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

    —#—

    One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

    —#—

    You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
    — The Fire Next Time

    —#—

    You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
    — from “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961)

    — # —

    The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was before you came in.

    —#—

    It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
    To be conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

    —#—

    I want American history taught. Unless I’m in that book, you’re not in it either. History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

    —#—

    For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
    —#—

    When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

    —#—

    I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. Love is not a feeling but a power that transforms us and those with whom we interact.

    —#—

    I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
    — Notes of a Native Son, 1955

    —#—

    One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.
    ― Nothing Personal (1964)

    —#—

    The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

    —#—

    Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

    — # —

    All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.
    — The Harlem Ghetto…

    —#—

    The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.
    — Notes on the House of Bondage

    —#—

    I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.
    — A Report from Occupied Territory, The Nation, 1966

    —#—

    These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.

    —#—

    I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.

    —#—

    The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

    Banksy

    I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.

    —#—

    If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.

    J.M. Barrie

    The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forver to be able to do it.
    — in Peter Pan

    —#—

    All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.
    — in Peter Pan

    —#—

    Never is an awfully long time.
    — in Peter Pan

    —#—

    Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

    —#—

    I’m not young enough to know everything.
    ― The Admirable Crichton

    Kenneth C Barnes

    Integrity is one of the virtues for which Quakers in the past have been praised. It is a quality worth having, but it is doubtful if it can be reached by self-conscious effort or by adherence to a principle… Integrity is a condition in which a person’s response to a total situation can be trusted: the opposite of a condition in which he would be moved by opportunist or self-seeking impulses breaking up his unity as a whole being. This condition of trust is different from the recognition that he will always be kind or always tell the truth. The integrity of some Dutch Friends I have met showed itself during the war in their willingness to tell lies to save their Jewish friends from the Gestapo or from starvation.
    ― 1972

    Steve Basile

    Each at their own time, each at their own pace, each in their own way. Coming out is a process, a journey, not a race. Unlike most journeys, there is no one destination in mind, only a direction. Keep on. When you stray, or slow down, don’t be afraid to ask advice or direction. Your journey is yours alone, and regardless of where you end up, or when, don’t let anyone else plan the trip.

    Joan Baez

    You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can decide how you’re going to live now.

    —#—

    If it’s natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?

    —#—

    Action is the antidote to despair.

    If I weren’t in denial part of the time, it would be too sorrowful to go on.

    —#—

    If you don’t have music, you have silence. There is power in both.

    Lucille Ball

    I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.

    Bruce Bawer

    Straight Americans need… an education of the heart and soul. They must understand – to begin with – how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.
    —The Advocate, April 1998

    Joshua Becker

    Gratitude is a discipline, not an emotion.

    The Belfast, Ireland COVID team

    When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself, ‘It looks like the end of the world.’ What you’re seeing is love in action. What you’re seeing, in that negative space, is how much we do care for each other, for our grandparents, our parents, our brothers and sisters, for people we will never meet.

    People will lose jobs over this. Some will lose their businesses. And some will lose their lives. All the more reason to take a moment, when you’re out on your walk, or on your way to the store, or just watching the news, to look into the emptiness and marvel at all of that love.

    Let it fill you and sustain you. It isn’t the end of the world. It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness.
    — March 26, 2020

    Yogi Berra

    When you see a fork in the road, take it!
    — Instructions he gives to visitors to his house. The road forks and both paths end at his front door.

    Daniel Berrigan

    We spoke out, committed civil disobedience, and went to jail because the peace hangs senselessly and precariously upon weapons costing billions to build and billions to improve — weapons which become more useless as we add to their destructive force. With this money we could have fed the world’s people. Half the children on earth go to bed hungry — millions more have retarding and stunting protein deficiencies. Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.

    Anthony Bing

    Professor Emeritus of English and Director of Peace and Global Studies – Earlham College – in his lecture, “Albert Camus: The Plague and an Ethic of Nonviolence”:

    Critics of nonviolent action often state that some resistance produces violence, gives birth to it, even if nonviolent action is intended as a protest against violence. Thus Martin Luther King, Jr., was advised by southern ministers in the city of Birmingham not to take his message to the streets because he would be inciting violence. King replied that it is sometimes the case that violence erupts in the midst of a nonviolence campaign. Gandhi found the same thing to be true. But their contention was that the violence was already present in the structures of the political, social, and economic systems against which nonviolent activists were rebelling. All nonviolence did in those cases was to bring to the surface the violence that was already inherent in unjust situations. As Martin Luther King Jr. moved from civil rights to anti-Vietnam activism, he exposed more and more of the violence in American society. And when in his last year he proposed to fight a nonviolent war against poverty, his Poor People’s Campaign, sealed his fate. When the system felt most attacked, it killed him.

    Wendell Berry

    Always in the woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place, there will be along with the feeling of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anyone else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.
    — The One Inch Journey

    Black Elk

    The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

    Augusto Boal

    Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.

    Derek Bok

    If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

    Erma Bombeck

    When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything you gave me.”

    —#—

    Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation’s compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain loving one another.

    Napoleon Bonaparte

    Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

    —#—

    Ten people who speak are more noise than ten-thousand that are silent.

    Dietrich Bonhoeffer

    Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
    ― The Cost of Discipleship, 1937

    John Boonstra

    What is the cost of exclusion? What is lost by not having those most affected at the table in the policy discourse? Sound governing, good planning, justice…. Everything, ultimately.

    Harry Bosch (fictional character)

    There are two kinds of truth, Mads. The kind that comes from darkness, gets bent and manipulated for someone’s self-interest, and the kind you carry inside and know is real.

    — Harry Bosch in the BOSCH television series, episode 501: “Two Kinds of Truth” written by Daniel Pyne from source material, Michael Connelly’s novel of the same name.

    Holly Boswell

    You don’t have a pronoun for me yet.
    — transgender activist and author

    David Bowie

    Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.

    Ray Bradbury

    We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

    —#—

    You don’t have to burn book to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

    —#—

    Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
    — Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

    —#—

    All of my life, I’ve jumped off the cliff and built my wings. It works every single time. It never fails.
    — Time magazine, 2010

    Mark Royston Brain

    There is no age at which a child is too young to learn that homophobia is wrong.

    Georges Braque

    Art is a wound turned into light.

    Jim Brochu

    “I’m trying to love the sinner and hate the sin.” – BUDDY
    “Me too. I’m trying to love the bigot and hate the bigotry.” – GIDEON
    — Gideon in ‘The Last Session’ ~ book by Jim Brochu, lyrics by Steve Schalchlin, with additional lyrics by John Bettis and Marie Cain

    Robert McAfee Brown

    How does one keep from “growing old inside”? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

    —#—

    Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

    —#—

    There comes a time when silence is betrayal.
    — The Need for a Moral Minority

    —#—

    I think we need to create a moral minority that could propose convictions without arrogance, insight without absolutism, commitment but without coercion, and democracy without demagoguery.
    — The Need for a Moral Minority

    Pearl S. Buck

    The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

    —#—

    The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.

    Gautama Buddha

    Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

    —#—

    There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

    —#—

    Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

    —#—

    You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

    —#—

    Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

    Frederick Buechner

    When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

    —#—

    For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.

    —#—

    If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.

    —#—

    Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.

    —#—

    Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

    Jimmy Buffett

    Grief is like the wake behind a boat. It starts out as a huge wavethat follows close behind you and is big enough to swamp and drown you if you suddenly stop moving forward. But if you do keep moving, the big wake will eventually dissipate. And after a long enough time, the waters of your life get calm again, and that is when the memories of those who have left begin to shine as bright and as enduring as the stars above.
    ― A Salty Piece of Land

    Quentin R. Bufogle

    Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn’t return my phone calls; the itch I’m unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn’t something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It’s just something I do because not writing, as I’ve found, is so much worse.

    —#—

    I want an avowed atheist in the White House. When time comes to push that button, I want whoever’s making the decision to understand that once it’s pushed, it’s over. Finito. They’re not gonna have lunch with Jesus. Won’t be deflowering 72 virgins on the great shag carpet of eternity, or reincarnated as a cow. I want someone making that decision who believes life on this Earth isn’t just a dress rehearsal for something better — but the only shot we get.

    —#—

    If a person has no conscience, it’s called being a sociopath. If a corporation has no conscience, it’s called capitalism.

    —#—

    If you’re gonna burn a bridge behind you, make sure you’ve crossed it first.

    Luis Buñuel

    If someone were to prove to me — right this minute — that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn’t change a single aspect of my behavior.

    —#—

    God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

    —#—

    What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn’t pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it’s as if he didn’t. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery. Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly explains), then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion. And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I’ve chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact.
    ― My Last Sigh

    Edmund Burke

    The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

    Danny Burstein

    Returning to the show felt like more than just a personal decision; it also felt like a political act. It was signaling unity. Unity with the complete strangers who sit in an audience and unite to speak as one.
    For theater isn’t just a form of entertainment; at its best, it is a collective, spiritual experience. It is church for the heart and mind. It is shul for the intellect. A mosque celebrating mankind. It reminds us how beautiful life can be and how fragile it is as well. It helps us form opinions and gain insight into the lives of our fellow humans.
    ― What Happens Inside a Broadway Theater Can Help Us Heal ― Sept. 24, 2021 ― New York Times Opinion

    Jack Butler

    We say people learn their language. Not exactly. Language grows in people, is a living being.
    ― The Story I Cannot Name Without Giving Away the Punchline

    —#—

    I think most people think language makes poetry, that it’s a refinement, an artifice, a purification. I saw as clearly as I could possibly see that it went at least exactly the opposite way. It’s poetry that has made language.
    ― The Story I Cannot Name Without Giving Away the Punchline

    —#—

    Knowing the truth may not always help, but in general it improves the odds.
    — The Way Cat Sees It    , published in Mud Flat Verse (an anthology) 2023

    Judith Butler

    No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge — it’s deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights.

    James Branch Cabell

    The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

    Sid Caesar

    Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.

    John Cage

    Not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. Begin anywhere.

    —#—

    I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

    —#—

    There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.
    In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

    —#—

    People who are not artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don’t have time to be inspired.

    —#—

    Art’s purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

    —#—

    Theater takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one that this is the case.

    —#—

    The situation must be yes-and-no, not either-or. Avoid a polar situation.
    ― quoted in “Pop Art Redefined” by John Russell and Suzi Gablik, 1969, pg. 23

    —#—

    Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.

    —#—

    The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

    —#—

    If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

    —#—

    When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

    —#—

    If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

    —#—

    The world is no longer a romantic place; some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don’t let the world win.

    —#—

    My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

    —#—

    Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

    —#—

    The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

    —#—

    Every something is an echo of nothing.

    —#—

    We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

    Dom Helder Camara, Dominican priest

    When I give food the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.

    Julia Cameron

    Leap and the net will appear.
    — The Artist’s Way

    Joseph Campbell

    People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
    — The Power of Myth

    —#—

    When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

    —#—

    Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

    —#—

    When you follow your bliss… doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.

    —#—

    The ultimate dragon is within you.

    —#—

    Eternity is not the hereafter.. this is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.

    —#—

    It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.

    —#—

    If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.

    —#—

    The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life.
    — The Power of Myth

    —#—

    Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

    —#—

    If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

    —#—

    The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.

    —#—

    Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

    —#—

    The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

    —#—

    Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

    —#—

    We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

    —#—

    The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

    —#—

    We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

    —#—

    The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

    —#—

    We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

    —#—

    You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.
    — The Hero’s Journey

    Albert Camus

    I love my country too much to be a nationalist.

    —#—

    In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.

    —#—

    Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

    —#—

    A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

    —#—

    Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

    —#—

    Great novelists are philosopher-novelists whom write in images instead of arguments.

    —#—

    If the world were clear, art would not exist.

    —#—

    My dear,
    In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
    In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
    In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
    I realized, through it all, that…
    In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
    And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
    Truly yours,
    Albert Camus

    —#—

    Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
    — in the preface to The Stranger

    George Carlin

    Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.

    —#—

    May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.

    —#—

    I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer’s disease where they slowly began to recover other people’s lost memories.

    —#—

    Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.

    —#—

    Irony is “a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result.” For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.

    —#—

    Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

    —#—

    Our nation was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. So they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could kill the rest of the red Indian people, in order to move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving us a place to take off and drop our atomic bombs on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto for this country oughtta be? “YOU GIVE US A COLOR, WE’LL WIPE IT OUT.”

    —#—

    Thou shalt not kill. Murder. The fifth commandment. But if you think about it…if you think about it, religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. No, more people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. All you have to do…all you have to do is look at slavery, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the World Trade Center, and you’ll see how seriously the religious folks take “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” The more devout they are…the more devout they are, the more they see murder as negotiable…it’s negotiable. It depends, you know? It depends, it depends on who’s doing the killing, and who’s getting killed.

    —#—

    Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

    —#—

    I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

    Hodding Carter

    There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.

    Jimmy Carter

    We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

    Max Carter

    Being opposed to war and violence isn’t about avoiding conflict; it’s about doing what one can to “live in the virtue of that life and power which takes away the occasion of war.”

    George Washington Carver

    Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

    Pablo Casals

    Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.

    Carlos Castaneda

    Your problem is that you think you have time.

    Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. This question is one that a very old man asks…Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t it is of no use.

    Stokely Carmichael

    Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.

    Willa Cather

    Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
    — On the Art of Fiction – The Borzoi, 1920

    Catherine the Great

    A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

    Center for Story-based Strategy

    Liberation requires vision. And vision, without imagination, leads us down the path already set for us.

    Dan Chaon

    A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn’t see.
    ― Staying Awake with Dan Chaon

    Harry Chapin

    There is a good tired and there is a bad tired. Ironically enough, bad tired can be the kind of day when you’ve won, but you chased other peoples dreams, you fought other peoples battles, you struggled through other peoples agendas, and when you hit the hay at night, victorious, you twist and turn because somehow it wasn’t your day, it wasn’t your life. Ironically enough, good tired can be a day that you lost everything, but you fought your battles, chased your dreams, lived your day, and when you hit the hay at night you sleep the sleep of the just. You rest easy, and you can say “take me away!”

    Tracy Chapman

    I’ve seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living ordinary lives.

    Cesar Chavez

    You are never strong enough that you don’t need help.

    —#—

    Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak… Non-violence is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.

    —#—

    Together, all things are possible.

    —#—

    Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.

    —#—

    We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.” You are never strong enough that you don’t need help.

    —#—

    We are confident. We have ourselves. We know how to sacrifice. We know how to work. We know how to combat the forces that oppose us. But even more than that, we are true believers in the whole idea of justice. Justice is so much on our side, that that is going to see us through.

    —#—

    Preservation of one’s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.

    —#—

    The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.

    —#—

    Violence just hurts those who are already hurt…Instead of exposing the brutality of the oppressor, it justifies it.

    G.K. Chesterton

    Fairy tales don’t teach children that monsters exist. Children already know monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children monsters can be destroyed.

    —#—

    I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
    — A Short History of England

    —#—

    A stiff apology is a second insult… The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

    Chinese proverb

    Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.

    Shirley Chisholm

    You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

    —#—

    If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

    —#—

    Service is the rent you pay for room on this earth.

    —#—

    I am literally and figuratively a dark horse.

    —#—

    Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated. that it is invisible because it is so normal.

    —#—

    I am, and always will be a catalyst for change.

    —#—

    When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

    —#—

    We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those that we have of ourselves.

    Margaret Cho

    Silence equals nonexistence. If I don’t raise my voice, it’s like I never existed.

    Pema Chödrön

    Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
    ― The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

    —#—

    To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

    —#—

    Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
    ― When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult

    —#—

    As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
    ― When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

    —#—

    Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

    —#—

    To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
    ― When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

    —#—

    Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.
    ― Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

    —#—

    As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion.

    —#—

    Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.

    Noam Chomsky

    Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope. If you assume there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

    —#—

    Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

    —#—

    If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

    —#—

    An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.
    ― Because We Say So

    Deepak Chopra

    The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

    —#—

    When you make a choice, you change the future.

    —#—

    Anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given.

    Winston Churchill

    We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

    —#—

    Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

    —#—

    If you are going through hell, keep going.

    Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro

    Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. Peacemaking is about being able to recognize in the face of the oppressed our own faces, and in the hands of the oppressors our own hands.

    Peacemaking, like most beautiful things, begins small. Matthew 18 gives us a clear process for making peace with someone who has hurt or offended us; first we are to talk directly with them, not at them or around them . . . Straight talk is counter-cultural in a world that prefers politeness to honesty. In his Rule, Benedict of Nursia speaks passionately about the deadly poison of “murmuring,” the negativity and dissension that can infect community and rot the fabric of love.

    Peacemaking begins with what we can change — ourselves. But it doesn’t end there. We are to be peacemakers in a world riddled with violence. That means interrupting violence with imagination, on our streets and in our world. Peacemaking “that is not like any way the empire brings peace” is rooted in the nonviolence of the cross, where we see a Savior who loves his enemies so much that he died for them.
    ― Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

    Michell C. Clark

    Do not let your empathy for others stop you from maintaining the boundaries that you set to protect yourself.

    Arthur C Clarke

    One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

    —#—

    A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

    —#—

    Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

    Alec Clayton

    The event seems more formal than we are comfortable with. We’re just old-line radicals who prefer rousing with the rabble to hobnobbing with the bigwigs.

    Bill Clayton

    This is not my choice.
    This is not forced upon me.
    This just is.

    Eldridge Cleaver

    If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

    Lucille Clifton

    I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

    —#—

    We cannot create what we can’t imagine.

    —#—

    I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy.

    —#—

    . . . even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties, in my definitions, I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me. Stability comes from inside, not outside.

    —#—

    People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

    Chuck Close

    The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates

    I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some to live within all of it.

    Kurt Cobain

    Wanting to be someone you’re not is a waste of the person you are.

    William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

    War is humanity’s most chronic and incurable disease. Said Plato: “Only the dead have seen an end to war.” Historian Will Durant estimated that in all recorded history only twenty-nine years could be described as free of war. And of all centuries, the last set records for bloodletting.
    — War Is the Coward’s Escape from the Problems of Peace from the July/August 2003 issue of Fellowship of Reconciliation magazine

    —#—

    Time and again, truth has proved the first casualty of war. That is because wars need lies to justify them, just as lies often call on violence for their defense. …

    —#—

    All nations make decisions based on self-interest and then defend them in the name of morality.

    —#—

    The first casualty of war is truth, which is why, along with all the dead, wounded, and bereaved, war is always cause for remorse, never for exhilaration. …

    —#—

    Americans are blessed to live in a democracy. In a democracy dissent is not disloyal; what is unpatriotic is subservience.

    —#—

    Apathy in the face of evil is morally unacceptable. Consequently, the sobering, demanding question is not “why abolish nuclear weapons?”? but rather “why not?”

    Leonard Cohen

    Ring the bells that still can ring
    Forget your perfect offering
    There is a crack, a crack in everything
    That’s how the light gets in.
    — lyric from “Anthem”

    —#—

    I can’t run no more
    with that lawless crowd
    while the killers in high places
    say their prayers out loud.
    But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
    a thundercloud
    and they’re going to hear from me.
    — Beautiful Losers (1966)

    —#—

    What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

    I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

    Burnell Cotlon

    … you know how people say you only live once? That’s not the truth. You don’t just live once. You only die once. You live every day. So every day that you live, you have to do something impactful. You’re not just born to fall in love, have a few kids, get a job, pay your bills, grow old and die. That’s not why you’re here. You have to find out why you’re here. And my purpose is easy. It’s service.

    — “After Hurricane Katrina, a grocer rebuilds his community a shop at a time” – StoryCorps, September 22, 2023

    James Bryant Conant

    Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

    Confucius

    To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

    Gregory Corso

    The opposite of poetry is hypocrisy.

    Stephen Covey

    Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.

    —#—

    Instead, I have an abundance mentality: When people are genuinely happy at the successes of others, the pie gets larger.

    —#—

    When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

    —#—

    We see the world, not as it is, but as we are — or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms.

    —#—

    We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people’s definition of you.

    —#—

    Courage isn’t absent of fear, it is the awareness that something else is important.

    —#—

    Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

    —#—

    You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside.

    —#—
    Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. Most people listen with the intent to reply.”
    —#—
    We judge ourselves by our intentions. And others by their actions.

    Bruce Coville

    Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.
    — in the book: Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher

    Creole proverb

    Tell me who you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.

    Quentin Crisp

    Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

    —#—

    If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

    Walter Crowley

    There is another legacy of the Sixties which is often neglected: tens of thousands of individuals who won the revolution at least in their own lives. They live within the system but they are not part of it. They organize their work and existences by their own rules, and have achieved a personal independence of thought, action and moral choice which does not require social sanction. They are free men and women and their examples might be the most subversive influences extant today.
    — Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle

    E.E. Cummings

    To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

    Michael Cunningham

    You can’t find peace by avoiding life.
    — in “The Hours”

    The Dalai Lama

    Compassion and love are not mere luxuries. As the source of both inner and external peace, they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.

    —#—

    My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

    —#—

    When you talk you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.

    Dante

    The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

    Erasmus Darwin

    He who allows oppression shares the crime.

    Ram Dass

    We’re all walking each other home.

    —#—

    Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

    Ram Dass and Paul Gorman

    Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response to love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.
    — How Can I Help?

    Angela Davis

    I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

    —#—

    If they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you at night.

    —#—

    We must always attempt to lift as we climb.

    —#—

    In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.

    —#—

    You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

    —#—

    I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy. It’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference. Diversity without structural transformation simply brings those who were previously excluded into a system as racist, as misogynistic, as it was before.

    Catherine Dawdy

    It’s all good‚ except when it’s not.

    Dorothy Day

    Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system.

    —#—

    The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

    —#—

    Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.

    —#—

    I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

    —#—

    Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

    —#—

    We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.

    —#—

    I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.

    —#—

    People say, “What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

    Richard Dawkins

    We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
    — The God Delusion

    Christopher Dawson

    As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

    Dayak proverb (Borneo)

    Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways; but where it is unwilling, it will find a thousand excuses.

    James Dean

    Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.

    Eugene Debs

    When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other’s throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known.

    —#—

    While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.

    Ellen DeGeneres

    In the beginning there was nothing. God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.

    David T. Dellinger

    Lest my way of life sounds puritanical or austere, I always emphasize that in the long run one can’t satisfactorily say no to war, violence, and injustice unless one is simultaneously saying yes to life, love, and laughter.
    ― (August 22, 1915 – May 25, 2004) He wrote this in the Yale class of 1936 fiftieth reunion book in 1986.

    Vine Deloria Jr.

    When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply “Ours.”

    —#—

    Religion is for people who are afraid of Hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.

    —#—

    Never has America lost a war … But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.
    ― Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

    Elizabeth Tipton Derieux

    Tomorrow’s peace must be more than the absence of armed conflict. It must be just, creative and cooperative. The weak must be protected from exploitation, the brutal strong curbed, and a sympathetic appreciation developed for the races of mankind.
    — “The Christian Church In Tomorrow’s World” October 1, 1944 The News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina

    Barbara Deming

    With one hand we say to one who is angry, or to an oppressor, or to an unjust system, ‘Stop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to play, I refuse to obey you, I refuse to cooperate with your demands, I refuse to build the walls and the bombs. I refuse to pay for the guns. With this hand I will even interfere with the wrong you are doing. I want to disrupt the easy pattern of your life.’ But then the advocate of nonviolence raises the other hand. It is raised outstretched — maybe with love and sympathy, maybe not — but always outstretched . . . With this hand we say, ‘I won’t let go of you or cast you out of the human race. I have faith that you can make a better choice than you are making now, and I’ll be here when you are ready. Like it or not, we are part of one another.’
    — Revolution and Equilibrium

    Charles Dickens

    Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
    — Hard Times

    Emily Dickinson

    I dwell in possibility.

    Joan Didion

    I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
    — Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

    —#—

    Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
    — Blue Nights, 2011

    Ani DiFranco

    I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap.

    —#—

    To me, being queer isn’t who you’re sleeping with; it’s just an idea that sexuality isn’t gender-based, that it’s love-based.

    Benjamin Disraeli

    The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but reveal to them their own.

    Annie Dillard

    There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

    Justice William O. Douglas

    Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

    Frederick Douglass

    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. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
    —     1857 treatise on West India Emancipation

    —#—

    The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

    —#—

    It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

    —#—

    It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.

    —#—

    Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

    John Donne

    No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

    A.J. Downey

    When you find people who not only tolerate your quirks but celebrate them with glad cries of “Me too!” be sure to cherish them. Because those weirdos are your tribe.
    ― Cutter’s Hope

    Andrea Dworkin

    Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

    Bob Dylan

    May you have a strong foundation when the winds of change shift.

    —#—

    Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything. It’s about creating yourself.

    Amelia Earhart

    Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

    Steve Earle

    The idea that murder victims’ families are best served by continuing the cycle of violence is something that I consider to be not only a lie, but criminally negligent. You lie to victims’ families when you tell them they’re going to receive closure if they participate in the process and witness the execution of a human being.

    Thomas Edison

    I have had a lot of success with failure.

    —#—

    Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

    —#—

    Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

    —#—

    Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

    Elizabeth Edwards

    If you know someone who has lost a child and you’re afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died — you’re not reminding them. They didn’t forget. What you’re reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived … and that is a great, great gift.

    —#—

    If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was ‘over it’. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breathe and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before.

    Max Ehrman

    You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
    — Desiderata (1927)

    Albert Einstein

    The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms— this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.
    — in Living Philosophies, 1931

    —#—

    Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

    —#—

    Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

    —#—

    If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

    —#—

    Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

    —#—

    Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

    —#—

    There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.

    —#—

    A person experiences life as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison, and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.

    —#—

    From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

    —#—

    You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

    —#—

    Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.

    —#—

    Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of mankind.

    —#—

    I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

    —#—

    We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created the problem.

    —#—

    The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

    —#—

    Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

    —#—

    Imagination is more important than knowledge.

    —#—

    If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

    —#—

    The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

    —#—

    If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, of what then is an empty desk a sign?

    —#—

    Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

    —#—

    Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.

    —#—

    If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

    —#—

    I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.

    —#—

    Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order — in short, of government.
    — On Peace 

    —#—

    A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

    Adapted from Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower

    As the old man walked the beach at dawn, he noticed a young man ahead of him picking up starfish and flinging them into the sea. Finally catching up with the youth, he asked him why he was doing this. The answer was that the stranded starfish would die if left until the morning sun. “But the beach goes on for miles and there are millions of starfish,” countered the other. “How can your effort make any difference?” The young man looked at the starfish in his hand and then threw it to safety in the waves. “It makes a difference to this one,” he said.

    Dwight D. Eisenhower

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
    — US general & Republican politician (1890 – 1969)

    —#—

    I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

    —#—

    Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

    Gordon Eklund

    Why had I been given a brain if I could not make use of it.
    — Moby, Too (1973)

    T.S. Eliot

    Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

    —#—

    I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.

    —#—

    To Laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

    —#—

    When it is dark enough you can see the stars.

    —#—

    The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.

    —#—

    A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. ? ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
    — Self-Reliance (1841)

    —#—

    What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

    —#—

    The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

    —#—

    I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

    —#—

    Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

    —#—

    The only way to have a friend is to be one.

    —#—

    The great teacher is not the man who supplies the most facts, but the one in whose presence we become different people.

    The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

    Nora Ephron

    Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally.
    — Keynote speech to Wellesley graduates in 1996

    —#—

    What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands.
    — Keynote speech to Wellesley graduates in 1996

    —#—

    Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives.
    — Keynote speech to Wellesley graduates in 1996

    Erik Erikson

    Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.

    Rachel Held Evans

    On a given Sunday morning I might spot six or seven people who have wronged or hurt me, people whose politics, theology, or personalities drive me crazy. The church is positively crawling with people who don’t deserve to be here…starting with me.But the table can transform even our enemies into companions. The table reminds us that, as brothers and sisters adopted into God’s family and invited to God’s banquet, we’re stuck with each other; we’re family. We might as well make peace. The table teaches us that faith isn’t about being right or good ot in agreement. Faith is about feeding and being fed…The church is God saying: “I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”
    — On Any Given Sunday

    Dr. Anthony Fauci

    I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care for other people.

    William Faulkner

    Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
    — Light in August

    —#—

    Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.

    Leslie Feinberg

    I live proudly in a body of my own design. I defend my right to be complex.
    — transgender activist and author

    Christopher Ferry

    Heal. Because we have children who don’t deserve the broken version of us.

    Carolyn Fields

    Although we generally think of community in terms of what binds participants together — shared norms, beliefs, and values — communities of difference are based not on homogeneity but on respect for difference and on the absolute regard for the intrinsic worth of every individual. Members of such communities do not begin with a dominant set of established norms but develop these norms together, with openness and respect, as they share their diverse perspectives.

    Harvey Fierstein

    Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself.
    — A 12-Step Program Guaranteed to Change your Life – his commencement speech to the Bennington College class of 1992

    —#—

    Change your mind as often as possible. Just because you thought something yesterday doesn’t mean you have to think it today. Don’t ever become a prisoner of your own opinion.

    —#—

    If you deny yourself commitment, what can you do with your life?

    Corey Fischer

    It is not normal for the leaders of a great democracy to turn against one of the most basic human impulses: the creation of art. Historically, all societies that have done so have been equally hostile to any expression of human freedom. This animus toward art is often couched in the argument that in the absence of government support, the market will best determine what kind of art should be nurtured. In fact, the market supports art that is marketable. Such art may be of high quality. It may satisfy our needs for entertainment or diversion. But art-as-product rarely provokes, challenges or innovates.
    — Wounded in the culture wars

    Emily Flake

    I guess I could just lean into the weirdness of what I’ve become.
    ― Visions of the Post-Pandemic Future – April 5, 2021 – The New Yorker

    Abraham Flexner

    Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
    — Educator (1866-1959)

    Bishop Yvette Flunder

    I think it is critically important that all Christians and all people of faith show their love not by making access to God and to good exclusionary, but to seek to be inclusionary essentially to make the table of the lord as we say in the Christian church available to everyone. And when we don’t know exactly what to do, let’s err on the side of putting more chairs at the table and making the table larger and longer and bigger until everyone has a place.
    — City of Refuge, United Church of Christ in Lead with Love

    Jane Fonda

    We’re still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That’s the old metaphor: You’re born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude. … A more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase. The upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity.
    — Life’s Third Act | TED Talk | December 2011

    Malcolm S. Forbes

    Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

    George Fox

    You shall say, ‘Christ sayest this’, ‘The Apostles sayest this’, but what doth thou say?
    — founder of the Religious Society of Friends

    Pope Francis

    Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun does not shine on itself and flowers do not spread their fragrence for themselves. Living for others is a rule of nature. We are all born to help each other. No matter how difficult it is… Life is good when you are happy; but much better when others are happy because of you.

    Anne Frank

    How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

    —#—

    It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must hold up my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

    Barney Frank

    Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight.

    Victor Frankl

    Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds meaning.

    Michael Franti & Spearhead

    From the tops of the buildings to the streets below
    Between the Wall Street banks and the empty homes
    Between the lines of the people standing all in a row
    There’s a crack in the gutter where a flower grows
    Reminding me that everything is possible
    — “Hey Hey Hey” – The Sound of Sunshine

    The Fray

    Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.
    — “All At Once”

    Paulo Freire

    Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply “blah, blah, blah,” and practice, pure activism.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    The teacher who really teaches, that is, who really works with contents within the context of methodological exactitude, will deny as false the hypocritical formula, ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ Whoever is engaged in ‘right thinking’ knows only too well that words not given body (made flesh) have little or no value. Right thinking is right doing.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    Hope is a natural, possible, and necessary impetus in the context of our unfinishedness.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    If I am a product of genetic, cultural, or class determination, I have no responsibility for my action in this world and, therefore, it is impossible for me to speak of ethics. Of course, this assumption of responsibility does not mean that we are not conditioned genetically, culturally, and socially. It means that we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    Washing ones hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
    — Pedagogy of Freedom

    —#—

    Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

    —#—

    But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or sub oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradiction of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them to be men is to be oppressors.

    Robert Frost

    The only way out is to go through.

    Elizabeth Fry

    I believe there is something in the mind, or in the heart, that shows its approbation when we do right. I give myself this advice: Do not fear truth, let it be so contrary to inclination and feeling. Never give up the search after it: and let me take courage, and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates, if it leads me to be a Quaker or not.
    — 1780-1845

    —#—

    I believe there is something in the mind, or in the heart, that shows its approbation when we do right. I give myself this advice: Do not fear truth, let it be so contrary to inclination and feeling. Never give up the search after it: and let me take courage, and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates, if it leads me to be a Quaker or not.

    William Fulbright

    The rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared and condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognized as the essential bond for a peaceful world.

    Robert Fulghum

    Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.

    Richard Buckminster Fuller

    You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

    —#—

    Either war is obsolete, or men are.

    —#—

    How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

    —#—

    If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

    —#—

    People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

    —#—

    We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

    —#—

    We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

    —#—

    When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

    —#—

    Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

    —#—

    Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.

    —#—

    There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

    —#—

    Man knows so much and does so little.

    —#—

    Love is metaphysical gravity.

    —#—

    I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.

    —#—

    I’m not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.

    —#—

    There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

    —#—

    Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.

    —#—

    When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

    —#—

    In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.

    Neil Gaiman

    Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

    Ernest Gaines

    Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

    Eduardo Galeano

    I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.

    —#—

    Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
    — The Nobodies

    Game of Thrones

    The past is already written. The ink is dry.
    — Three-eyed Raven in “Oathbreaker” – Season 6 / Episode 3

    Violence is a disease. You don’t cure a disease by spreading it to more people. 
    — Brother Ray in “The Broken Man” – Season 6 / Episode 7

    Indira Gandhi

    My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

    Mohandas K. Gandhi

    You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

    —#—

    I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides, and my windows to be closed. Instead, I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

    What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

    —#—

    I think it would be a good idea.
    — His reply when a reporter asked what he thought of Western civilization.

    —#—

    It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us. This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say.

    —#—

    Violent means will give violent freedom.

    —#—

    I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

    —#—

    However much I may sympathize with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.

    —#—

    What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

    —#—

    What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated?

    —#—

    It may be long before the law of love will be recognized in international affairs. The machinery’s of government stand between and hide the hearts of one people from those of another.

    —#—

    Democracy and violence can ill go together. Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side.

    —#—

    Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.

    —#—

    Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.

    —#—

    Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.

    —#—

    An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

    —#—

    Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

    —#—

    You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

    —#—

    It is as much our obligation not to cooperate with evil as it is to cooperate with good.

    —#—

    Unity, to be real, must stand the severest strain without breaking.

    —#—

    Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.

    —#—

    The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – that is where the battle should be fought.

    —#—

    I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills.

    —#—

    Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.

    Mohandas K. Gandhi and son Arun Gandhi and Steven W. Gilbert

    Gandhi’s “Seven Blunders of the World” that Lead to Violence… + 5
    Mohandas Gandhi gave his list of “Seven Blunders of the World” that lead to violence to his grandson Arun Gandhi shortly before his assassination. The list was then first published in the Christian Science Monitor (February 1, 1995: pg 14).

    Wealth without work
    Pleasure without conscience
    Knowledge without character
    Commerce without morality
    Science without humanity
    Worship without sacrifice
    Politics without principle

    Arun Gandhi added:

    Rights without responsibilities

    Four more were added by Steven W. Gilbert, Director of Technology Projects at the American Association for Higher Education, and founder and president of The Teaching, Learning, and Technology (TLT) Group focus on the relationship between learning, teaching, and technology:

    Technology without direction
    Connection without community
    Teaching without joy
    Learning without hope

    Gangaji

    Under the anger, under the fear, under the despair, under the broken heartedness, there is a radiance that has never been harmed, that has never been lost, that is the truth of who one is. 

    Arne Garborg

    It is said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not knowledge, but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; leisure, but not peace. You can have the husk of everything, but not the kernel.

    —#—

    To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart, And to sing it to them when they have forgotten.

    Robert Gardner

    I suppose I should wish you success, but that is really easy. I would like to wish you something that is harder to come by. So I am going to wish you meaning in life. And meaning is not something you stumble across like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of human kind as it is passed on to you; out of your own talent and understanding, out of things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, Then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

    Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom. But sharing data is the first step toward community.

    Marvin Gaye

    War is not the answer, because only love can conquer hate.

    Jean Genet

    If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
    ― “The Balcony” (play, 1956)

    Ricky Gervais

    I think life is precious ’cause you can’t watch it again. I mean, you can believe in an afterlife if that makes you feel better. Doesn’t mean it’s true. But once you realize you’re not gonna be around forever, I think that’s what makes life so magical. One day you’ll… eat your last meal, smell your last flower, hug your friend for the very last time. You might not know it’s the last time. So that’s why you should do everything you love with passion, you know? Treasure the few years you’ve got because… that’s all there is.
    — Ricky Gervais as Tony in “After Life” Episode #1.6 (TV Episode 2019)

    —#—

    There’s that lovely thing, “A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never sit in.” Good people do things for other people, that’s it – the end.
    — Penelope Wilton as Anne in “After Life” Episode #1.6 (TV Episode 2019)

    —#—

    Happiness is amazing, it’s so amazing it doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not.
    — Penelope Wilton as Anne in “After Life” Episode #1.6 (TV Episode 2019)

    Ritu Ghatourey

    Be selective in your battles. Sometimes peace is better than being right.

    Thomas Gibson

    Moving on is not closure. It’s not neat, and it’s not about turning the page. It is about moving on, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve left something behind.

    Kahlil Gibran

    Your children are not your children.
    They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
    They come through you, but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
    You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.
    You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
    You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
    For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
    You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
    The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
    Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness, For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
    — in “The Prophet” (1923)

    Andre Gide

    It is better to be hated for what one is than loved for what one is not.

    Candace Gingrich

    Most times, the only gay or lesbian face people know of is who they see in the pride parade. To judge us on that would be like judging heterosexuals after watching Mardi Gras.

    Elizabeth Gilbert

    Creation is the antidote of despair.

    —#—

    Let me list for you some of the many ways in which you might be afraid to live a more creative life: You’re afraid you have no talent. You’re afraid you’ll be rejected or criticized or ridiculed or misunderstood or—worst of all—ignored. You’re afraid there’s no market for your creativity, and therefore no point in pursuing it. You’re afraid somebody else already did it better. You’re afraid everybody else already did it better. You’re afraid somebody will steal your ideas, so it’s safer to keep them hidden forever in the dark. You’re afraid you won’t be taken seriously. You’re afraid your work isn’t politically, emotionally, or artistically important enough to change anyone’s life. You’re afraid your dreams are embarrassing. You’re afraid that someday you’ll look back on your creative endeavors as having been a giant waste of time, effort, and money. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of discipline. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of work space, or financial freedom, or empty hours in which to focus on invention or exploration. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of training or degree. You’re afraid you’re too fat. (I don’t know what this has to do with creativity, exactly, but experience has taught me that most of us are afraid we’re too fat, so let’s just put that on the anxiety list, for good measure.) You’re afraid of being exposed as a hack, or a fool, or a dilettante, or a narcissist. You’re afraid of upsetting your family with what you may reveal. You’re afraid of what your peers and coworkers will say if you express your personal truth aloud. You’re afraid of unleashing your innermost demons, and you really don’t want to encounter your innermost demons. You’re afraid your best work is behind you. You’re afraid you never had any best work to begin with. You’re afraid you neglected your creativity for so long that now you can never get it back. You’re afraid you’re too old to start. You’re afraid you’re too young to start. You’re afraid because something went well in your life once, so obviously nothing can ever go well again. You’re afraid because nothing has ever gone well in your life, so why bother trying? You’re afraid of being a one-hit wonder. You’re afraid of being a no-hit wonder.
    ― Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

    Allen Ginsberg

    Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.

    Jeanne Giordano

    You can’t scare me; I was picketing before you were born.

    Nikki Giovanni

    There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.

    —#—

    Mistakes are a fact of life: It is the response to the error that counts.

    Ira Glass

    Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

    Hermann Goering

    The Nazi party leader was interviewed by Gustave Gilbert during the Easter recess of the Nuremberg trials, April 18, 1946, and is quoted in Gilbert’s book ‘Nuremberg Diary.’

    Goering: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

    Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

    Goering: Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

    —#—

    Education is dangerous. Every educated person is a future enemy.

    Ronald Gold

    The diagnosis of homosexuality as a “disorder” is a contributing factor to the pathology of those homosexuals who do become mentally ill…. Nothing is more likely to make you sick than being constantly told that you are sick.

    Jeff Goldblum

    You were so busy trying to see if you could do it that you didn’t stop to think about whether you should.
    —in Jurassic Park

    Whoopi Goldberg

    Normal is in the eye of the beholder.

    —#—

    Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine.

    Emma Goldman

    The most violent element in society is ignorance.

    —#—

    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.

    —#—

    When we can’t dream any longer we die.

    —#—

    The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.

    —#—

    The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and express their ardor and faith in some supreme deed, have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

    —#—

    If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

    Barry Goldwater

    Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternative.
    — Conservative Politician, Former Arizona Senator and Governor, 1981 speech

    Paul Goodman

    Confusion is the state of promise, the fertile void where surprise is possible again. Confusion is in fact the state we are in, and we should be wise to cultivate it.
    — Growing Up Absurd

    Alexander John Goodrum

    Diversity is not for the squeamish. It means making (and taking) a space at the table that includes people you don’t like, don’t agree with, or who you think are just plain wrong.
    — disabled African-American bisexual FTM transsexual activist, 1960-2002

    Ruth Gordon

    Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.
    — L’Officiel magazine, Summer 1980.

    —#—

    Courage is like a strain of yoghurt culture, if you have some you can have some more.
    — (1980) in “Ruth Gordon, an open book”


    —#—

    Acting is the use of human experience with talent added.
    — (1980) in “Ruth Gordon, an open book”


    —#—


    Despair is your friend in show business. I don’t believe you can act if happiness is your lot. It’s the ups that keep you living and the downs that mete out talent.
    — (1980) in “Ruth Gordon, an open book”


    —#—


    Life is getting through the moment. The philosopher William James says to cultivate the cheerful attitude. Now nobody had more trouble than he did — except me. I had more trouble in my life than anybody. But your first big trouble can be a bonanza if you live through it. Get through the first trouble, you’ll probably make it through the next one.

    John Green

    Grief does not change you. It reveals you.

    Rayna Green

    By the time they reach second grade, every child in the country knows what an Indian is. They wear lots of feathers, ride spotted ponies and shoot arrows. Indians who don’t fit the type are invisible; they simply can’t be imagined by the majority of white children or adults.
    — writer, college professor and Director of the American Indian Program at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, of German and Cherokee descent

    Vivian Greene

    Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.

    Mel Greenberg

    Your time on Earth is limited. Don’t try to “age with grace” – age with mischief, audacity, and a good story to tell.

    Glenn Greenwald

    Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of government power. If people are able to operate in the dark, it is not likely or probable, but inevitable that they will abuse their power. It’s just human nature. And that’s been understood for as long as politics has existed. That transparency is really the only guarantee that we have for checking those who exercise power.
    And that’s the reason why the government has progressively destroyed one institution after the next designed to bring transparency, whether it’s the media that they turned into the supine creatures or the Congress that does more to empower government secrecy than any other, or the courts that have been incredibly subservient towards sources of government secrecy. One of the only avenues we have left for learning what people in power do are whistleblowers. People who essentially step out and risk their individual liberty, and that’s why there’s such a war being waged against them.
    — In a Bill Moyers interview on Boston Marathon bombing: Talking to the PBS host about civil liberties, terrorism, US foreign policy and the dangers of secrecy. April 26, 2013

    Stephen Grosz

    Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.
    ― The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

    Terri Guillemets

    The world is hugged by the faithful arms of volunteers.

    Woody Guthrie

    Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.

    —#—

    I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim. Too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my very last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

    Mira Hadlow

    Before you silence yourself to keep the peace, ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that can happen if I use my voice?” Usually the answer is “this person may dislike me.” That’s it.

    If you are silencing yourself for this reason, they already don’t like you. They only like a fictional version of you.

    Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī
    — Persian poet aka Hafez or Hafiz

    Raise your voice.

    The words you speak become the house you live in.

    —#—

    I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

    —#—

    Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living In better conditions.

    Edward Everett Hale

    I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.

    —#—

    Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there’s a big difference between “being a writer” and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. “You’ve got to want to write,” I say to them, “not want to be a writer.”
    The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.

    Paulo Freire

    The oppressor is always damaged by believing and treating others as less than fully human. Always.

    Alex Haley

    Find the good — and praise it.

    Thich Nhat Hanh

    Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with the truth.

    —#—

    We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

    —#—

    In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

    —#—

    People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

    —#—

    Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

    —#—

    When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look into the reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

    —#—

    And once we have the condition of peace and joy in us, we can afford to be in any situation. Even in the situation of hell, we will be able to contribute our peace and serenity. The most important thing is for each of us to have some freedom in our heart, some stability in our heart, some peace in our heart. Only then will we be able to relieve the suffering around us.

    —#—

    Peace is all around us. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.

    —#—

    Often, we feel that we need a leader outside of ourselves –a Buddha, a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.– to show the way. But we have the Buddha inside of us. We have Gandhi and King inside of us as well. We are interconnected. We don’t need to wait for some other person to be the change we want to see in the world.

    —#—

    If we take the time to look deeply, we see that understanding and compassion arise from suffering. Understanding is the understanding of suffering, and compassion is the kind of energy that can transform suffering. If suffering is not there, we have no means to cultivate our understanding and our compassion. This is something quite simple to see.

    If you come to Plum Village in the summertime, you see many lotus flowers. Without the mud the lotus flowers cannot grow. You cannot separate lotus flowers from the mud. It is the same with understanding and love. These are two kinds of flowers that grow on the ground of suffering.

    I would not like to send my children to a place where there is no suffering, because I know that in such a place my children will have no chance to develop their compassion and understanding. I don’t know whether my friends who come from the background of Christianity or Judaism can accept this—that in the Kingdom of God there is suffering—but in Buddhist teaching it is clear that suffering and happiness inter-are. Where there is no suffering there is no happiness either. We know from our own experiences that it is impossible to cultivate more understanding and compassion if suffering isn’t there. It is with the mud that we can make flowers. It is with the suffering that we can make compassion and understanding.
    — New Year’s Eve Dharma Talk on December 31, 2005

    —#—

    You are not an observer, you are a participant.

    —#—

    When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That is the message he is sending.

    —#—

    Bhikkhus, the teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon.
    The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore. The raft is needed, but the raft is not the other shore. An intelligent person would not carry the raft around on his head after making it across to the other shore. Bhikkhus, my teaching is the raft which can help you cross to the other shore beyond birth and death. Use the raft to cross to the other shore, but don’t hang onto it as your property. Do not become caught in the teaching. You must be able to let it go.
    ― Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

    —#—

    We can’t wait any longer to restore our relationship with the Earth because right now the Earth and everyone on Earth is in real danger. When a society is overcome by greed and pride, there is violence and unnecessary devastation. When we perpetrate violence toward our own and other species, we’re being violent toward ourselves at the same time. When we know how to protect all beings, we will be protecting ourselves. A spiritual revolution is needed if we’re going to confront the environmental challenges that face us.

    Carol Hanisch

    The personal is political.

    David Harris

    There’s lots of fear, and the issue isn’t whether or not you’re scared. The issue is what you do after you’re scared.
    ― co-founder of ‘The Resistance’ in the film, “The Boys Who Said No”

    —#—

    Evil is a participatory phenomenon. It counts on participation to be successful. The option you have is to withdraw your participation. From there it’s all liberation, whatever the cost.
    ― co-founder of ‘The Resistance’ in the film, “The Boys Who Said No”

    Joanne Harris

    I’m not sure what the theme of my homily today ought to be. Do I want to speak of the miracle of our Lord’s divine transformation? Not really, no. I don’t want to talk about his divinity. I’d rather talk about his humanity. I mean, you know, how he lived his life on earth: his kindness, his tolerance. Listen, here is what I think. I think we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.
    — This was the young priest Pere Henri’s Easter Sunday sermon at the end of the film “Chocolat” (2000) based on the book by Joanne Harris.

    Dag Hammarskjöld

    Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?

    Vaclav Havel

    I am really not an optimist because not all is right in the world. I am really not a pessimist because not all is wrong in the world. I do, however, cultivate hope in my heart as an antidote for cynicism, apathy, malaise, and hopelessness.

    Stephen Hawking

    The greatest enemy of knowledge isn’t the ignorance of knowledge but the illusion of it.

    Audrey Hepburn

    Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being’s suffering. Nothing—not career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we’re going to survive with dignity.

    Gerald K. Hibbert

    May we never forget that our Public Worship is a corporate act: we meet, not as isolated individuals, but as a group. In the silence we enter into fellowship not only with God, but with one another. Our hearts go out one to another, we sense another’s need and realize our common sharing in “the bundle of life “, and so – whether in silence or in speech- we bear one another’s burdens and can speak to one another’s condition.

    Colin Higgins

    I like to watch things grow. They GROW, and FADE, and BLOOM and die and…. turn into something else…. Ah, LIFE!
    — Spoken by Ruth Gordon as Maude in the film “Harold and Maude”, 1971
    —#—
    A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life.
    — Spoken by Ruth Gordon as Maude in the film “Harold and Maude”, 1971
    —#—
    My body is on the earth, but my head is in the stars.
    — Spoken by Ruth Gordon as Maude in the film “Harold and Maude”, 1971

    Robert A. Heinlein

    When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it’s subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man, the most you can do is kill him.

    Lillian Hellman

    Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

    Becky Hendrick

              The dangers are that ‘art business’ can absorb the ‘art’ just like our ‘economic life’ has, in many cases, cancelled out or replaced ‘life.’ And young artists, unless they have been conditioned to see through and resist myths, perceive art as the business — hype, promotion, ‘career.’ 
                  Wendell Berry talks about this vis a vis literature — and someone has said (and I believe) that you can’t hold thoughts of art and money at the same time. The ‘art’ of the 80s is about the 80s, about $, greed, short-term profit, excess. Trump! Junk Bonds!    
                  Just as the religious right’s attack on art is about politics and power, not art.

    Jimi Hendrix

    When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

    Herman Hesse

    If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.

    Jim Hightower

    The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

    —#—

    The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

    —#—

    If you don’t speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?

    —#—

    Politics isn’t about left versus right; it’s about top versus bottom.

    Christopher Hitchens

    No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
    — Post-colonialism and Post-theism

    The essence of the independent mind relies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
    — Letters to a Young Contrarian

    —#—

    Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.
    — Letters to a Young Contrarian

    —#—

    This depressing discovery need not blind us to the true moral, which is that everybody can do something, and that the role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints.
    — Letters to a Young Contrarian

    —#—

    In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.
    — Letters to a Young Contrarian

    —#—

    There are times when one wants to hold society’s feet to the fire, and to force a confrontation, and to avoid the blandishments of those who always call upon everyone to “lighten up” and change the subject.
    — Letters to a Young Contrarian

    —#—

    Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.
    — Letters to a Young Contrarian

    David Hockney

    The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.

    —#—

    Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

    —#—

    What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

    —#—

    It takes a long time to make it simple.

    —#—

    Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious.

    —#—

    In the end nobody knows how it’s done — how art is made. It can’t be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn’t explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

    —#—

    I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.

    P. C. Hodgell

    That which can be destroyed by truth should be. 
    — Seeker’s Mask

    Abbie Hoffman

    You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

    Dave Hollis

    In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to.
    — Over Grow the System

    bell hooks

    Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. Most of us are unclear about what to do to protect and strengthen caring bonds when our self-centered needs are not being met.

    —#—

    If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

    —#—

    Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

    —#—

    I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.
    — in Angelou – a conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks – with editor Melvin McLeod, Shambhala Sun, January 1998

    —#—

    It is necessary to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist — the potential victim within that we must rescue — otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.
    — Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

    —#—

    … in terms of thinking about the larger meaning of compassion. I feel I’m always trying to address the question of not dividing people into oppressors and oppressed, but trying to see the potential in all of us to occupy those two poles, and knowing that we have to believe in the capacity of someone else to change towards that which is enhancing of our collective well-being. Or we just condemn people to stay in place.
    — in Angelou – a conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks – with editor Melvin McLeod, Shambhala Sun, January 1998

    —#—

    To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

    —#—

    Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

    —#—

    I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.

    —#—

    Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.
    — All about Love

    Hope for Peace & Justice

    Our values are simple. The journey is not.

    A Hopi Prayer

    Do not stand at my grave and weep
    I am not there,
    I do not sleep.
    I am a thousand winds that blow.
    I am the diamond glints on snow.
    I am the sunlight
    On the ripened grain.
    I am the gentle Autumn’s rain.
    When you awaken in the morning hush,
    I am the swift uplifting rush
    of quiet birds in circled flight.
    I am the soft stars that shine at night.
    Do not stand at my grave and cry.
    I am not there.
    I did not die.
    My Spirit is still alive…

    Khaled Hosseini

    But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

    Jane Howard

    Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
    — Families

    Dolores Huerta

    Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.

    —#—

    If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.

    —#—

    Giving kids clothes and food is one thing but it’s much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important, and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.

    Felicity Huffman

    I know as actors our job is to usually shed our skins. But I think as people, our job is to become who we really are, and so I would like to salute the men and women who brave ostracism, alienation, and a life on the margins to become who they really are.
    — acceptance speech as best actress in her role as a transgender woman in drama “Transamerica” at the 63rd Annual Golden Globe Awards on 1/16/06

    Charles Evans Hughes

    When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

    Victor Hugo

    There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and this is an idea whose time has come.

    Jonathan Lockwood Huie

    Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace. 

    Zora Neale Hurston

    Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the Sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

    —#—

    Prayer seems to be a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down.

    I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out “how long?” to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime.

    It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of the morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me.

    I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space.

    Why fear? The stuff of my being is the matter, ever-changing, ever-moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe does not need finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.
    — from her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road

    Robert Hutchins

    The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

    Aldous Huxley

    Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

    —#—

    One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

    —#—

    After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

    Julian Huxley

    Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.

    Howard Ikemoto 

    When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”

    Daniel K. Inouye

    History provides no guarantees on the shape of things to come. The possibilities for good and evil remain essentially today, as they have always been, as numerous as the stars. Yet, if there is anything about which I am absolutely certain, it is that within each of us lies the power to transform the world for the better. Let there be no doubt as to the ability of well-meaning individuals to change life’s odds and to influence his or her own destiny along a positive course. I believe most passionately that in each one of you lies a Jefferson, a Lincoln, an Eleanor Roosevelt, a Mother Teresa, and a Martin Luther King, Jr. None of these great men and women accepted the failures and inequities of the world in which they were born, and neither should you! They believed in the perfectibility of the world in which they lived and would not be turned away from what they knew was good, what was right, and what was just.

    Irish proverb

    It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.

    John Irving

    When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feelings that she’s gone, forever–there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
    — A Prayer For Owen Meany

    Molly Ivins

    I still believe in Hope – mostly because there’s no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

    —#—

    The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

    —#—

    What you need is sustained outrage…there’s far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

    —#—

    I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.

    William James

    Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

    Thomas Jefferson

    Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as manners and opinions change, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

    —#—

    If there be one principle more deeply written than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

    —#—

    All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

    —#—

    Dissent is the purest form of patriotism.

    —#—

    The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

    —#—

    Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.

    —#—

    The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

    —#—

    If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.

    Penn Jillette

    Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else’s vision.
    — the larger, louder half of comedy-magic team Penn & Teller

    Steve Jobs

    Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
    — in a commencement address delivered to Stanford University on June 12, 2005

    —#—

    Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
    — in a commencement address delivered to Stanford University on June 12, 2005

    —#—

    The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
    — in a commencement address delivered to Stanford University on June 12, 2005

    —#—

    I want to put a ding in the universe.

    Samuel Johnson

    Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.

    Sonia Johnson

    It’s funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have ‘lifestyles’.

    Angelina Jolie

    Someday you will be faced with the reality of loss. And as life goes on, days rolling into nights, it will become clear that you never really stop missing someone special who’s gone, you just learn to live around the gaping hole of their absence.
    When you lose someone you can’t imagine living without, your heart breaks wide open, and the bad news is you never completely get over the loss. You will never forget them. However, in a backward way, this is also the good news. They will live on in the warmth of your broken heart that doesn’t fully heal back up, and you will continue to grow and experience life, even with your wound.
    It’s like breaking an ankle that never heals perfectly, and that still hurts when you dance, but you dance anyway with a slight limp, and this limp just adds to the depth of your performance and the authenticity of your character.
    The people you lose remain a part of you. Remember them and always cherish the good moments spent with them.

    Cleve Jones

    A movement that seeks to advance only its own members is going to accomplish little.
    — Corporate Money Has Too Much Influence on LGBT Movement – April 4, 2012

    Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

    Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.

    —#—

    I’m not a lady, I’m a hellraiser.

    —#—

    You must stand for free speech in the streets.

    —#—

    Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.

    —#—

    I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

    —#—

    I was born in revolution.

    Micky ScottBey Jones

    Invitation to Brave Space

    Together we will create brave space
    Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
    We exist in the real world
    We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
    In this space
    We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
    We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
    We call each other to more truth and love
    We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
    We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
    We will not be perfect.
    This space will not be perfect.
    It will not always be what we wish it to be
    But
    It will be our brave space together,
    and
    We will work on it side by side.

    Robert Jones, Jr.

    We can disagree and still love each other … unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
    — August 18, 2015 @SonofBaldwin (Note: This quote is often attributed to James Baldwin, but it is not his.)

    Erica Jong

    And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

    June Jordan

    We are the ones we have been waiting for.
    — Poem for South African Women

    Carl Jung

    Learn all your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.

    —#—

    I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

    —#—

    If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

    Jolie Justus

    I always say, if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

    Lots more quotes in the collection: K-M / N-Z

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