Quotes
For some reason, these touch me in some way. Make of that what you will.
- Reality is whatever doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.
— Philip K. Dick - The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
— Marcus Aurelius - We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
— attributed to Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C. - The moral test of a government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; the twilight of life, the elderly; the shadows of life, the sick, needy and the handicapped.
— Hubert Humphrey, U.S. Senator from Minnesota, 1949–1964, 1971–1978;
38th Vice President of the United States, 1964–1968 - To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
— Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, 1901–1909 - Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
— Robert Jackson, U. S. Supreme Court Justice
in West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette (1943) - I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
— James Madison - We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
— Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, March 9, 1954 - An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
— Mahatma Gandhi - Possibly apocryphal conversation between Pope John XXIII and a cardinal after the Pope had announced that Protestant leaders would be invited to the Second Vatican Council:
Cardinal: But your holiness, Protestants are heretics!
Pope John: Do not say “heretics,” my son. Say “separated brethren”.
Cardinal: They are in league with the devil!
Pope John: Do not say “devil,” my son. Say “separated angel”. - In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.
— Albert Camus - I have learned silence from the talkative; tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind. I should not be ungrateful to those teachers.
— Kahilil Gibran - Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are giving and the pain you are given back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton of the feast is you.
— Frederick Buechner - You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place
— Jonathan Swift - Life is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.
— Virginia Satir - Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
— Robert Louis Stevenson - Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
— Kurt Vonnegut - Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle - A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan - You did then what you knew how to do, and when you knew better, you did better.
— Maya Angelou - If God should ask on Judgment Day
“Did you clean the house today?”
I shall say, “I did not—
I played with my children, and forgot.” - 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 promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s 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.
— John Donne
