"People are disturbed not by things, but by the view they take of them."
- Epictetus
"A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's."
- Richard Whately
"Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty."
- Madame de Stael
"A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom." - Bob Dylan
"Pure love is a willingness to give without a thought of receiving anything in return." - Peace Pilgrim
"We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
- Thomas Merton
"My unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders."
- Leo Tolstoy
"It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it."
- Albert Einstein
"Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"
- Lillian Hellman
"We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution."
- Cynthia Ozick
"Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it."
- Howard Zinn
"If you don't speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?"
- Jim Hightower
"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."
- Henry Steele Commager
"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."
- Stanley Milgram
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
- Mortimer Adler
"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform."
- Theodore H. White
"In the landscape of time, there are few locations less comfortable than that of one who waits for some person or event to arrive at some unknown moment in the future."
- Robert Grudin
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
- William James
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs."
- Leo Tolstoy
"The significant problems of our time cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them."
- Albert Einstein
"I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it."
- Jerry Brown
"In order to hold on to thoughts of anger, bitterness, revenge, guilt, and shame, we have to use a lot of energy."
- Edwene Gaines
"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."
- Lao Tzu
"Many of us are afraid to follow our passions, to pursue what we want most because it means taking risks and even facing failure. But to pursue your passion with all your heart and soul is success in itself. The greatest failure is to have never really tried."
- Robyn Allen
"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart."
- Carl Jung
"Whether you think you can or think you can't, you are right."
- Henry Ford
"Compassion is the currency that leads to true wealth. "
- Jim Carry
"I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living."
- Lin Yutang
"The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom."
- Bell Hooks
"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."
- George Orwell
"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
- Martin Heidegger
"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."
- George Orwell
"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, political parties, nations, and eras it's the rule."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."
- Albert Schweitzer
"When people go within and connect with themselves, they realize they are connected to the universe and they are connected to all living things."
- Armand Dimele
"I think that the question of how power can be exerted from the lower reaches has never been more important. It will ultimately determine whether another world is indeed possible."
- Frances Fox Piven
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."
- Aldous Huxley
"Ethics should precede economics... We know this because we've seen the results of capitalism without conscience: the pollution of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat; the endangerment of workers; and the sale of dangerous products -- from cars to toys to drugs. All in pursuit of greater and greater profits."
- Arianna Huffington
"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."
- William Arthur Ward
" None of the quick fixes to the world's problems are going to work, unless we change the dream of greed and scarcity that the world is dreaming."
- John Perkins
"Courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success."
- Johann von Goethe
"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn."
- Benjamin Franklin
"To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality."
- John Locke
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
- H. L. Mencken
"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
- Paulo Freire
"Regret for wasted time is more wasted time."
- Mason Cooley
"When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken, or cease to be honest."
- Anonymous
"Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past."
- George Orwell
"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
- E.M. Forster
"Let no man pull you low enough to hate him."
- Martin Luther King Jr
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
- Rene Descartes
"If I could give you one key, and one key only to more abundant life, I would give you a sense of your own worth, an unshakeable sense of your own dignity as one grounded in the source of the cosmic dance, as one who plays a unique part in the unfolding of the story of the world."
- Greta Crosby
"No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive."
- Gandhi
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees wth your own reason and your own common sense."
- Buddha
"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
- Elie Wiesel
"Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation."
- Henry Ward Beecher
"Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power."
- Madame de Stael
"It's easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
- Frederick Douglass
"You measure a government by how few people need help."
- Pat Schroeder
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
- Peter F. Drucker
"In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest."
- Henry Miller
"Promise only what you can deliver. Then deliver more than you promise."
- Anonymous
"When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders."
- Veterans Fast for Life
"In reality, humility means nothing other than complete honesty about yourself."
- William Countryman
"Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works."
- Carl Sagan
"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing 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."
- Susan B. Anthony
"Action has meaning only in relationship and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"We live in an area where elected politicians ignore the needs of their constituents, where the judiciary and police institutions will not uphold the rights of citizens, where the media is afraid to report the truth, where lawlessness abounds and ordinary people are left unprotected and defenseless against the rapacity of a few. The answer to our dilemma is for people of courage to actively help each other. Only if we unite can we succeed. That is the only way. There is no other way."
- People, stand up!
"Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks -- we will also find our path of authentic service in the world."
- Parker J. Palmer
"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace. "
- John Lennon
"What, then, is legislation? It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place."
- Lysander Spooner. Natural Law. Chapter III: Natural Law Contrasted With Legislation. Section IV
"The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character."
- Margaret Chase Smith
"Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing."
- Michael Lerner
"Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher."
- Parker J. Palmer
"When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result."
- Byron Katie
"Violence is an admission that one's ideas and goals cannot prevail on their own merits."
- Edward Kennedy
"Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Leaders don't force people to follow - they invite them on a journey."
- Charles S. Lauer
"They misunderestimate me"
- G.W. Bush
"To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground."
- Stephen Covey
"Those who have experienced the most, have suffered so much that they have ceased to hate. Hate is more for those with a slightly guilty conscience, and who by chewing on old hate in times of peace wish to demonstrate how great they were during the war."
- Thor Heyerdahl
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest," but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is."
- Sydney J. Harris
"The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can."
- Socrates
"The purpose of our lives is to give birth to the best which is within us."
- Marianne Williamson
"Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now."
- Audre Lorde
"Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself. When you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself. The practice is always to go back to oneself."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"Privilege is the greatest enemy of right."
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
"If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years -- we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on."
- Sharon Salzberg
"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."
- Buddha
"We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups."
- Deborah Tannen
"Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free."
- Anne Sullivan
"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean."
- Dag Hammarskjold
"What worries you, masters you."
- John Locke
"Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them."
- Michael Lerner
"A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination."
- Nelson Mandela
"Historically, the most terrible things -- war, genocide, and slavery -- have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."
- Howard Zinn
"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
- John Stuart Mill
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience."
- Howard Zinn
"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."
- Louis D. Brandeis
"When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you."
- African proverb
"Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life."
- Joseph Campbell
"The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom."
- Bell Hooks
When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, "Have faith and take your troubles to God." Act instead as though there were no God, as though there were only one person in the world who could help - only yourself."
- Martin Buber
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
- Dresden James
"You can ignore reality, but you can´t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality"
- Ayn Rand
"Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving."
- Dale Carnegie
"The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous."
- Frederick Douglass
"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult."
- Seneca
"When you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends."
- James Ishmael Ford
"Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing."
- Rachel Naomi Remen
"Humanity has only scratched the surface of its real potential."
- Peace Pilgrim
"Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical."
- Albert Schweitzer
"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."
- William Butler Yeats
"Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh."
- Kahlil Gibran
"We can have democracy, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
- Louis D. Brandeis
"Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than in reality."
- Seneca
"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations."
- Douglas MacArthur
"Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man."
- Norman Cousins
"Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer."
- Robert Graves
"I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders."
- Leo Tolstoy
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
- Peter F. Drucker
"Compassion is more important than intellect in calling forth the love that the work of peace needs, and intuition can often be a far more powerful searchlight than cold reason."
- Betty Williams
"Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors."
- Paulo Freire
"The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated."
- William Ellery Channing
"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
- John Stuart Mill
"Live truth instead of expressing it."
- Elbert Hubbard
"If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart."
- David Korten
"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so."
- Mohandas Gandhi
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence."
- Henri-Frederic Amiel
"Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave."
- G. I. Gurdjieff
"Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
- Virginia Woolf
"Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude."
- Denis Waitley
"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Be where you are; otherwise you will miss your life."
- Buddha
"Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness."
- Leo Tolstoy
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience."
- Howard Zinn
"Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit."
- Edward R. Murrow
"A harmful truth is better than a useful lie."
- Thomas Mann
"The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth."
- Pierre Abelard
"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense."
- Robert G. Ingersoll
"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong."
- Gandhi
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
- Anais Nin
"Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks - we will also find our path of authentic service in the world."
- Parker J. Palmer
"Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and make new ones like them."
- Marcus Aurelius
"Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom."
- Merry Browne
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."
- G.K. Chesterton
"Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty."
- Madame de Stael
"I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us."
- Howard Mumford Jones
"All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?"
- Buddha
"Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we're holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we'd rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we're stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are."
- Pema Chodron
"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence."
- Henry David Thoreau
"No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change."
- Barbara de Angelis
"We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."
- Audre Lorde
"We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
- Thomas Merton
"Fear always springs from ignorance."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There's far too much unthinking respect given to authority."
- Molly Ivins
"The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind."
- Kahlil Gibran
"Without community, there is no liberation."
- Audre Lorde
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
- Johann von Goethe
"Morality is doing what is right regardless what you are told, religion is doing what you are told regardless
of what is right"
- Anonymous
"When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
- Dom Helder Camara
"Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond."
- Jeffrey Borenstein
"Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists."
- Norman Mailer
"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
- Albert Camus
"One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed."
- Sigmund Freud
"You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law."
- Lyn Beth Neylon
"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."
- George Bernard Shaw
"He who buys what he does not need steals from himself."
- Anonymous
"A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. You know - Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out gray."
- Alan Sherman
"Government is an unnecessary evil. Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness."
- Fred Woodworth
"Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong."
- Dandemis
"It's better to fight for something than against something."
- Anonymous
"You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him."
- Leo Aikman
"You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy."
- Eric Hoffer
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual and schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
- H.L. Mencken
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."
- Mohandas Gandhi
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell"
- Edward Abbey
"Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers."
- Mignon McLaughlin
"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."
- John Allston
"When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong, they taught me different was wrong."
- Ani Difranco
"Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up."
- Jesse Jackson
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot."
- Horace Greeley
"There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance."
- Joseph Addison
"The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you."
- John E. Southard
"Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws"
- Walter Landor
"The only real nation is humanity."
- Paul Farmer
"When the freedom they desired most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free, and never was free again."
- Edith Hamilton
"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen."
- Tommy Smothers
"Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history."
- Joan Wallach Scott
"No one is free when others are oppressed."
- Anonymous
"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear."
- Alan Coren
"We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed."
- Michel de Montaigne
"Men are not punished for their sins, but by them."
- Elbert Hubbard
"There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought"
- Charles Kingsley
"History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment."
- Lemuel K. Washburn
"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."
- Edmund Burke
"All men should strive
to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why."
- James Thurber
"The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority."
- Ralph W. Sockman
"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart." - Julien Green
"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."
- Roald Dahl
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
- Robert A. Heinlein
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
- Albert Einstein
"Philosophy is nothing but common sense in a dress suit."
- Anonymous
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
- Isaac Asimov
"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone - our parents, teachers, analysts - hypnotizes us to "see" the world and construe it in the "right" way. These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us. The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we become undeaf, unblind and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meanings in the new book of our existence. Be careful in your choice of hypnotists."
- Sidney Jourard
"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."
- Albert Einstein
"Our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."
- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."
- John F. Kennedy
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along." ~Carl Sagan
"Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim."
- Thomas Macaulay
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him."
- Galileo Galilei
"Governments should not possess instruments of coercion and violence that are denied to their citizens."
- Edgar A. Suter
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
- Mark Twain
"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing."
- John Berger
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
- P.J. O'Rourke
"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant"
- Charles de Gaulle
"Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold - but so does a hard-boiled egg."
- Anonymous
"It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience."
- Lemuel K. Washburn
"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever."
- Clarence Darrow
"I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right."
- Henry David Thoreau
"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
- Abraham Lincoln
