Quote Only Thread

[§ê¢rꆧ]

"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

-Frederick Douglass, 1848

[barracuda]

You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus.

- Cary Grant

[Allegro]

~

• Men show their characters in nothing more clearly
  than in what they think laughable.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (b 1749), German writer, polymath

• True remorse is never just regret over consequences;
  it is regret over motive.

~ Mignon McLaughlin (b 1913), American journalist, author

[Allegro]

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• America is the only country that went from barbarism
  to decadence without civilization in between.

~ Oscar Wilde (b 1854), Irish writer, poet

• Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized
  by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.

~ Arnold Joseph Toynbee (b 1889), British historian

[Allegro]

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• “Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. It may be worthwhile to spend a few moments in speculating as to possible future developments of those that are oligarchies.
  
  “…Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so. …
  
  “Gradually, by selective breeding the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organised insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.…”

Excerpts from The Impact of Science on Society, 1952. Refer.

~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell (b 1872), Literature Nobel Prize 1950

[Jeff]

"What's one day? Bah, nothing at all. You turn round and it's dark. Nothing for it, I say, but jump right from bed to table."
- The Satyricon

[Allegro]

~

• Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

~ Thomas Stephen Szasz (b 1920), critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry

[Allegro]

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• No education that is not founded on art will ever succeed.

~ Margaret Mead (b 1901), American cultural anthropologist

[Allegro]

~

• Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important
  simply because we have acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature.

~ Rachel Carson (b 1907), American marine biologist, nature writer

• ... The old appeals to racial, sexual, religious chauvinism,
  to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.
  The new consciousness is developing, which sees the Earth
  as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war
  with itself is doomed.... Refer.

~ Carl Edward Sagan (b 1934), American astronomer, astrochemist

[barracuda]

You can't win against fools.

- Jigo, from Princess Mononoke

[Allegro]

~

• We will be a better country when each religious group
  can trust its members to obey the dictates of their
  own religious faith without assistance from the legal
  structure of their country.

~ Margaret Mead (b 1901), cultural anthropologist

• I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically
  and physically, by this society and because I believe
  that the women’s movement is saying that we have
  come to an edge of history when men—insofar as they
  are embodiments of the patriarchal idea—have
  become dangerous to children and other living things,
  themselves included.

~ Adrienne Rich (b 1929), American feminist, poet, teacher, writer

• My silences have not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die of them in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am ... doing my work, and have come to ask you, are you doing yours? Refer.

~ Audre Lorde (b 1934), writer, poet, activist

• The most important question in the world is, ‘Why is the child crying?’

~ Alice Malsenior Walker (b 1944), African American feminist,
won Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for The Color Purple

[Allegro]

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• ... And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride. No literary tragedy can approach the futile horror of the White Paper. The diplomatists, seeing from the first the inevitable end, mostly wishing to avoid it, yet drifted from hour to hour of the swift crisis, restrained by punctilio from making or accepting the small concessions that might have saved the world, hurried on at last by blind fear to loose the armies for the work of mutual butchery. Refer Google Books.

~ Bertrand William Russell (b 1872), British philosopher, logician, mathematician, Literature Nobel Prize 1950

[Allegro]

~

• “And what does [war] amount to?” said Satan, with his evil chuckle.
  
  “Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense—to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heart—if you have one—you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation! Drink to their augmentation! Drink to—”

Excerpt from The Mysterious Stranger, refer A History of War

~ Mark Twain (b Samuel Langhorne Clemens 1835), American novelist, humorist

[Allegro]

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• New York is a meeting place for every race in the world, but the Chinese, Armenians, Russians, and Germans remain foreigners. So does everyone except the blacks. There is no doubt but that the blacks exercise great influence in North America, and, no matter what anyone says, they are the most delicate, spiritual element in that world.

~ Federico García Lorca (b 1898), Spanish poet, dramatist, theatre director, internationally recognized as an emblematic member of Generation of ’27.

[Allegro]

~

• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
  committed citizens can change the world. Indeed,
  it is the only thing that ever has.
  
  ~ ~ ~
  
  I was brought up to believe that the only thing
  worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate
  information in the world.

~ Margaret Mead (b 1901), cultural anthropologist