Sometimes someone else’s inspired words give us the courage to speak or to claim an insight that we felt was a bit outside the norm, until we find that someone else more famous said the same thing. Read this collection of quotations from speakers as diverse as Albert Einstein and Amelia Earhart, and be inspired.
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“Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.”Martin Luther King, Jr.
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. Muhammad Ali
“Activism is my rent for living on the planet.”— Alice Walker, American writer & social activist
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Rabindranath Tagore
“The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones. ” .John Maynard Keynes
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” quote by Angela Davis.
A Walk
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far beyond the road I have begun,
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has an inner light, even from a distance-
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces. Rilke
“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to man as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved to be incompatible.” William James (1842-1910)
The end of all knowledge should be service to others. Cesar Chavez
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” –Max DePree
“You become what you think about all day long.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi
“Leadership is meaning making in a community of practice.” Wilfrid Drath
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“
William Gibson
“You don’t grow up. You grow yourself up.” Student at Mazeond College
“Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. ” John Maynard Keynes
” Those who carry a new story and who risk speaking it abroad have played a crucial role in times of historic shifts. Before a new era can come into form, there must be a new story. The playwright Arthur Miller noted that we know an era has ended when its basic illusions have been exhausted. I would add that these basic illusions not only are exhausted, but also have become exhausting. As they fail to produce the results we want, we just repeat them with greater desperation, plummeting ourselves into cynicism and despair as we lock into these cycles of failure. ” Margaret Wheatley
“HOPE- Either we have hope within us or we do not. It is a dimension of the soul and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world. HOPE is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. HOPE in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. HOPE is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is HOPE, above all which gives the strength to live and continually try new things. ” Vaclav Havel
“Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers” John Gardner
“After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”― Terry Eagleton
“The worst evil is not to commit crimes, but to fail to do the good one might have done.”― Leon Bloy
“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.” E E Cummings
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back” John Maynard Keynes
“People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”― Peter Senge
“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.” Pascal
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.” –Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
“The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the “happiness of mankind” as its promise.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” — Frederick Buechner.
“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”— Orson Scott Card
“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.”― bell hooks,
“For this was the other thing that Elric knew: that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance.”― Michael Moorcock
“I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.” Vera Brittain
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead
“Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.” Carl Sagan
“I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.”― bell hooks,
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.” (Arthur Miller 1974: 30, 32, 36)
“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” –John Ruskin
“Persistence wears down resistance.”― William J Federer,
“Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind”― Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute
“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in hopeless situations like prison or the sewer) is, I believe, a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t. Hope is not a prognostication — it’s an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can’t delegate that to anyone else.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.” –Vaclav Havel
“Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.”― Albert Camus
“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” Antoine De Sainte Exupery
“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little – do what you can.” – Sydney Smith
“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 fifty miles of concrete pavement. 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 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.[1][5]
President Eisenhower 1953 “Cross of Iron Speech.”
“In the universe of atoms, friction is the norm, not the exception. It’s this very opposition, this challenge, that ignites the spark of innovation. When the world seems against you, embrace that resistance. It’s the sandpaper to your innovation, the very friction that shapes your destiny. Never stop pushing. Never stop dreaming. Here’s to the crazy ones who use that friction to sculpt their future.”― H.S. Crow, Lunora
“Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there ‘is’ such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians – because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.”― Madeleine L’Engle
“Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.”― Martin Luther King Jr.
“Some things are best mended by a break.” Edith Wharton
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” James Baldwin
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” James Baldwin
“As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.” [2]
President Eisenhower Farewell Speech 1960
“What George Washington did right was to realize how much of what he thought was right was wrong.” Nathaniel Philbrick
“A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.”Naval Ravikant
“Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.” Naval Ravikant
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” James Baldwin
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together ” President Eisenhower Farewell Speech 1960
“Do it! What are you waiting on? Do it! Stand up for what you believe in. The world needs your voice. Whoever you are, you have something to say. Say it.”— Kerry Washington, American actress, director, and activist
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt
“Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action, or be even a poor substitute for it. The function of the mere critic is of very subordinate usefulness. It is the doer of deeds who actually counts in the battle for life, and not the man who looks on and says how the fight ought to be fought, without himself sharing the stress and the danger.” Theodore Roosevelt
“People all 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.” – Joseph Campbell
“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” -John C. Maxwell
“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.” James Baldwin
“Volunteers don’t get paid, not because they’re worthless, but because they’re priceless.” – Sherry Anderson
“It is not the story you listen to, it is the story that you listen through.” P Costello
“…the man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic-the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.” Theodore Roosevelt
“Its not what you achieve in a life that matters so much as what you set in motion that carries on beyond your life.” P Andrew Costello
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
“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” ( the original quote has been added to here)
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – Epictetus
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” James Balwdin
“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.” – Edward Everett Hale
“Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.”— Aristotle
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.” – William James
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
“Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed.” The Bhagavad Gita
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”— Angela Davis, American political activist & academic
“The miracle is this–the more we share, the more we have.” –Leonard Nimoy
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do. “ James Baldwin
“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” – Michelangelo
“We have lost the ability to create metaphors for life. We have lost the ability to give shape to things, to recognize the events around us and in us, let alone to interpret them. In this way we have ceased being the likenesses of God, and our existence is unjustified. We are, in fact, dead. . . . We feed on knowledge which has long since decayed.” Friedensreich Hundertwasser
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. ” James Baldwin
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.— The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Barry
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky
“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.” John Muir
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” James Baldwin
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”― William Hutchinson Murray
“We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
“Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt
“A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.” James Baldwin
“It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.” Theodore Roosevelt
“This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.” Theodore Roosevelt
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” James Baldwin
“Leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders.”― Tom Peters
“I used to think bearing witness was a passive act. I don’t believe that anymore. I think that when we are present, when we bear witness, when we do not divert our gaze, something is revealed — the very marrow of life. We change. A transformation occurs. Our consciousness shifts.” — Terry Tempest Williams
“Work for a cause, not for applause. Live life to express, not to impress. Don’t strive to make your presence noticed, just make your absence felt.”— Unknown
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”— Mark Twain
“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.” (George Bernard Shaw)
If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Ida B. Wells
“No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”— Dorothy Day, Catholic social activist & journalist
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. ” James Baldwin
“From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored, so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.” The Coddling of the American Mind: by Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
“Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.” —Frederick Buechner
“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” (Mark Van Doren)
“When you see something that is not just, not fair, or not right, you have to do something. You have to say something. Make a little noise. It’s time for us to get into good trouble, necessary trouble.”— John Lewis, leader within American civil rights movements & former congressman
” My mentor taught me when an opportunity is presented to you, you look at it, and you FEEL it, and ask yourself Does this opportunity light me up? Does it fill me with a sense of curiosity? Does it excite me? If it does, hell yeah, I’m involved.“ –Layne Beachley
“The problem with being a leader is that you’re never sure if you’re being followed or chased.” – Claire A. Murray
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Abraham Lincoln 1862
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” Frederick Douglas 1857
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” Albert Einstein
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” Frederick Douglas
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglas
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Frederick Douglas
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglas
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” President John F Kennedy 1962
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Martin Luther King 1963
“It could be that your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.”
Ashleigh Brilliant
“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Action is the antidote to despair.”— Joan Baez, American singer-songwriter & activist
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” – Andre Gide
“Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.” – Abraham Lincoln
“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance next time.
Malcolm X
“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.”— Audre Lorde, American writer, feminist, and civil rights activist
“Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” Malcolm X
“You can’t separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” Malcolm X 1965
. “You don’t fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.” – Bobby Seale
“Your actions speak so loudly, I can not hear what you are saying.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages… In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Protesting is never a disturbance of the peace. Corruption, injustice, war and intimidation are disturbances of the peace.” – Bryant McGill
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it has been faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise we literally are criminals.” James Baldwin
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society.” James Baldwin
“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.” James Baldwin
“When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid,” Audre Lorde
“Your silence will not protect you,” Audre Lorde
“It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation.” Paulo Freire
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” – Jane Addams
“ He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. “Friedrich Nietzsche
“If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”― Emma Goldman
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The Balfour declaration 1917
“There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment in history, or nothing happens.” – Coretta Scott King
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.” Arundhati Roy
“No one will do for you what you need to do for yourself. We cannot afford to be separate. We have to see that all of us are in the same boat.” – Dorothy Height
“Wherever women gather together, failure is impossible.” – Susan B. Anthony
“We build the path as we can, rock by rock.” – Hosea Williams
“And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them.” Thomas Jefferson
“When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” – Bayard Rustin
“You said, ‘They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.’ ‘What,’ I asked you, ‘is harmless about a dreamer, and what,’ I asked you, ‘is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.” Tennessee Williams
“THE STATE OF ISRAEL…will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” The Israeli Declaration of Independence 1947
“The Lord has shown you what is good. He has told you what he
requires of you. You must act with justice. You must love to show mercy. And
you must be humble as you live in the sight of your God.” Micah 6-8
“Let justice roll down like waters.”
Amos 5:24
“A revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.” Robert F Kennedy
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.“ — Rob Siltanem –Apple Campaign
“Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the
Pharaoh won’t let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won’t
have to be violent.” Michael Hardt
“I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.” Alexis de Tocqueville,
“Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning. ”Hannah Arendt
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'” Jack Kerouac
“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.” Martin Buber
“There are three principles in a man’s being and life: The principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don’t do what I say.” Martin Buber
“Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.” ”Martin Buber
“The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.” Hannah Arendt
“’The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Karl Marx
“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Steve Biko
“It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die” Steve Bantu Biko
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”― Antonio Gramsci
“In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.” Pope John XXIII
“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” Thoreau
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” – Margaret J. Wheatley
“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker
“Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.” Blaise Pascal
“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…” Amilcar Cabral
“International solidarity is not an act of charity: It is an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objective. The foremost of these objectives is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level possible.”—Samora Machel.
Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
“It is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice… there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others––especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!”― Cornel West,
“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.” –James Baldwin
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead
Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. William James
“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” –E.M. Forster
“No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” –Aesop
“I wish to do something Great and Wonderful, but I must start by doing the little things like they were Great and Wonderful.” ––“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.” –Dorothy Day
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” –St. Francis of Assisi ( ?)
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” –William James
“It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. Never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.” – Desmond Tutu
There will be no equity without solidarity. There will be no justice without a social movement.–Joia Mukherjee
What counts in life is not the mere fact that we lived. It is the difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.–Nelson Mandela
“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. “Andrea Dworkin
“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.” Rosa Parks
“No man is good enough to govern another man without his consent. ” Abraham Lincoln
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” Abraham Lincoln
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Abraham Lincoln
“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw. ” Nelson Mandela
“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” Thomas Jefferson
I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended. Nelson Mandela
The function of freedom is to free someone else. Toni Morrison
You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get it. Then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it. Malcolm X
Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries? Amelia Earhart
“We all have limits. Almost no one reaches theirs. You definitely haven’t.”
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck. Frederick Douglass
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. Frederick Douglass
“What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.”— Andre Gide
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”— Lilla Watson
“Unless you’re the lead dog of the sled, the view never changes.” ( Author Unknown)
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.– Woodrow Wilson
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.– Victor Frankl
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.– Henry Ford
The ordinary focus on what they’re getting. The extraordinary think about who they’re becoming. Robin Scharma
“Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to die.” Carrie Fisher
“Today’s pain is tomorrow’s power. The more you suffer today, the stronger you are tomorrow.” Unknown
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.– Pearl S. Buck
In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.– Abraham Maslow
“Do it or don’t do it. There is no try.” Yoda
The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.– W.E.B. Du Bois
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who are alive.” – Howard Thurman
“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” – Jimi Hendrix
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams
“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East. ” Christmas Message 1939 King George VI quoting poet Minnie Louise Haskins (My Mother’s favorite quote)
Peace is not merely a vacuum left by the ending of wars. It is the creation of two eternal principles, justice and freedom. – Author: James T. Shotwell
I will never forget that the only reason I’m standing here today is because somebody, somewhere stood up for me when it was risky. Stood up when it was hard. Stood up when it wasn’t popular. And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world. Barack Obama
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives. ALVIN TOFFLER
The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change. BILL CLINTON
“I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.” – Charles F. Kettering
Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together. SAUL ALINSKY
Change demands new learning. ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. ERIC HOFFER
Societies as well as people become afraid of change as they grow older. It’s human nature. The young have adventures while the old sit at home and nurture their memories. PAUL MCAULEY
The sad thing is that, even though we know our lives aren’t working in certain areas, we are still afraid to change. We are locked into our comfort zone, no matter how self-destructive it may be. Yet, the only way to get out of our comfort zone and to be free of our problems and limitations is to get uncomfortable. ROBERT ANTHONY
“The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. “MAYA ANGELOU
Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show. -Terry Pratchet, Discworld (Going Postal)
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532)
“Every generation needs a new revolution.”— Thomas Jefferson
You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. -Christopher Robin, Winnie The Pooh
No one in history has ever been insulted into agreement.— Arthur Brooks
You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.— Doug Conant (CEO of Campbell Soup, as quoted in Harvard Business Review)
You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.— Buckminister Fuller
“How, then, does one become an activist?
The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment together.”― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine
“I watched the speech backstage on the teleprompter. Obama paused for a moment, and I saw the text freeze. “I’m going off script here for a second,” he said, “but before I came here I met with a group of young Palestinians from the age of fifteen to twenty-two. And talking to them, they weren’t that different from my daughters. They weren’t that different from your daughters or sons. I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those kids, they’d say, I want these kids to succeed; I want them to prosper. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do. I believe that’s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a chance to listen to them and talk to them. I believe that.” His comments were met with rolling applause, and when he dived back into the prepared text it occurred to me that this tribute—this imploring of Israelis to see Palestinians as human beings no different from themselves—might be the most he would be able to do to keep a promise to those Palestinian kids.”― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House
“MOST OF THE NATIONS OF the Middle East can be divided into those with long histories and no oil, and those that have lots of oil and very little history. With a few notable exceptions, both groups share a common feature: they were cobbled together by outsiders. The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by Europeans after the First World War with no regard for the interests or backgrounds of the people who inhabited it.”― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”― Bertolt Brecht
“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” Moya Angelou
“The best way to find out whether you’re on the right path? Stop looking at the path.” –Marcus Buckingham
“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!” Bertolt Brecht
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.” ― Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems
— “The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope.”― Bertolt Brecht
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” Wittgenstein
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Wittenstein
“I am not young enough to know everything.” Oscar Wilde
‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ Orwell
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ Orwell
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. (…) ? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”― George Orwell, Orwell on Truth
______________________________________________________________________________
A MLK SELECTION
We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame.
It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.
And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.”
So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.
We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.
We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.
And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference.
It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.” That’s the question facing America today.
The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.
On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?
There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “We ain’t goin’ study war no more.” This is the challenge facing modern man.
Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.
I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.
Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the “Star Spangled Banner” were written, we were here.
For more than two centuries our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail.
We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing “We Shall Overcome.”
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. MLK
_____________________________________________________________________________
“You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man ought to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.”
Antonio Gramsci
“The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work and go away from labor. We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves. We are at the stage where the people in charge of the government and industry are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s up to us to reimagine the alternatives and not just protest against them and expect them to do better” — Grace Lee Boggs
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. – George Washington Carver
“When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.” Reply to King George VI, on a cold morning at the airport. As cited in Man of the Century (2002) Churchill
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” MLK
It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it. – Lena Horne
“In the third space of the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. rallied what became the core of a great movement following the arrest of Rosa Parks. In the third space of the Magic Lantern Theater an ex-convict named Vaclav Havel met with his peers to design a peaceful revolution that led him within several months to the Presidential Castle. In the third space of an organization called PEN, fellow writers stood bravely to share the hit placed by an Iranian ruler on Salman Rushdie. In the third space fronting Upper Darby (Pennsylvania’s) 69th Street Terminal, citizens of Delaware County have nightly, over the past five years, offered meals cooked in their own kitchens to their hungry and homeless neighbors.
As we seek to build social capital by means of community-based and nonprofit organizations, we work to assure that our social economy thrives, and that fewer of our fellow citizens either bowl or suffer alone. Such are the rewards of acting in the many and often surprising corners of society’s third space.” Van Till
A luta continua; victoria ascerta–A rallying cry of the FRELIMO movement during Mozambique’s war for independence.
“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…”— Amilcar Cabral
“International solidarity is not an act of charity: It is an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objective. The foremost of these objectives is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level possible.”—Samora Machel.
Always hear the ‘Yes’ in the ‘No’. Marshall Rosenberg
Content by PuddleDancer Press. Use of content okay with attribution. Please visit www.nonviolentcommunication.com to learn more about Nonviolent Communication.
“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Scott Peck
Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
“It is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice… there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others––especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!”― Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire
“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.” –James Baldwin
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead
“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” –E.M. Forster
“No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” –Aesop
“I wish to do something Great and Wonderful, but I must start by doing the little things like they were Great and Wonderful.” –Albert Einstein
“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.” –Dorothy Day
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” –St. Francis of Assisi
“It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. Never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.” – Desmond Tutu
There will be no equity without solidarity. There will be no justice without a social movement.–Joia Mukherjee
What counts in life is not the mere fact that we lived. It is the difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.–Nelson Mandela
“The opposite of poverty is justice.” Bryan Stevenson
“When I am speaking, I always try to evolve the audience.” “You mean involve the audience?” “Oh yes, That too.” Kit Turen
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” — Wayne Gretzky
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” — Anonymous
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” — Anonymous
“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting — Sun Tzu
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman
“I am always doing what I can’t do yet in order to learn how to do it.” — Vincent van Gogh
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” — Robert Frost
“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.” — E.E. Cummings
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” — Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” — George Orwell, 1984
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” — Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where — ”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” — Alice and the Cheshire Cat (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)
“Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death.” — Otto von Bismarck
“Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” — Henry Ford
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” — Anonymous
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” — Anonymous
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.” — Anonymous
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — Anonymous
“Everyone 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.” — Anonymous
“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.” — Squire Bill Widener
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” — William Bruce Cameron
“Victorious warriers win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” — Zhang Yu
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” — Zora Neale Hurston