"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."
- George Washington, First US President, 1789-1797
"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
"That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong."
- William J.H. Boetcker
"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."
- Frederick Douglass
"If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life."
- James A. Michener
"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
"Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation."
- Henry Ward Beecher
"You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. However, as an adult, you are one hundred percent responsible for fixing it."
- Ken Keyes, Jr.
"Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain."
- Anonymous
"The poor are poor because the rich are rich."
- Anonymous
"Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it."
- Anonymous
"There will be a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning."
- Louis L'Amour
"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant."
- Horace
"Silence never won rights. They are not handed down from above; they are forced by pressures from below."
- Roger Baldwin
"To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man."
- Michael Servetus
"One must look hard through history to find when a clear understanding of the truth moved anyone to fire the first shot."
- Robert Brault
"War is fear cloaked in courage."
- William Westmoreland
"The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war."
- George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career
"Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself."
- Francis Meehan
"We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, "here and now" without possible postponement. Life is fired at us pointblank."
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
"Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves."
- Anonymous
"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
"There is no education like adversity."
- Disraeli
"The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety."
- Henry Louis Mencken
"I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own."
- Howard Zinn
"Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason."
- Abraham Joshua Heschel
"We know too well that our freedom isnt complete without the freedom of the Palestinians."
- Nelson Mandela
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
- Malcom X
"Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it."
- Benjamin Lichtenberg
"It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews."
- Albert Einstein
"If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war."
- Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War
"What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world."
- Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
"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
"Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank."
- Peter F. Drucker
"If you risk nothing, then you risk everything."
- Geena Davis
"Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal."
- Johann von Goethe
"Our government teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy"
- Louis Brandeis
"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses." - Plato
"Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."
- James Russell Lowell
"When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you."
- Lao Tzu
"The great danger for American democracy is not from the protesters. That democracy is too poorly realized for us to consider critics - even rebels - as the chief problem. Its fulfillment requires us all, living in an ossified system which sustains too much killing and too much selfishness, to join the protest."
- Howard Zinn
"Education is the attempt to ‘lead out’ from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination."
- Parker J. Palmer
"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."
- Anais Nin
"Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than in reality."
- Seneca
"Hide the truth and the truth becomes your enemy. Disclose the truth and it becomes your weapon."
- Col. Phillip Corso
"Never doubt that you can change history. You already have"
- Marge Piercy
"Live truth instead of expressing it."
- Elbert Hubbard
"When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely - the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears - when you give your whole attention to it."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"The love we give away is the only love we keep."
- Elbert Hubbard
"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can."
- John Gardner
"Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others."
- Moliere
"The worst evil of all is to leave the ranks of the living before one dies."
- Seneca
"Learning how to love is the goal and the purpose of spiritual life - not learning how to develop psychic powers, not learning how to bow, chant, do yoga, or even meditate, but learning to love. Love is the truth. Love is the light."
- Lama Surya Das
"The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine."
- Sir James Jeans
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
- Albert Einstein
"The spiritual path is not a solo endeavor. In fact, the very notion of a self who is trying to free her/himself is a delusion. We are in it together and the company of spiritual friends helps us realize our interconnectedness."
- Tara Brach
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality."
- Dante Aleghieri
"We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others."
- Blaise Pascal
"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope."
- Maya Angelou
"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."
- William Jennings Bryan
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."
- Henry David Thoreau
"We can travel a long way and do many things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. it is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home."
- Sharon Salzberg
"The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure."
- Baruch Spinoza
"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
"The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating."
- Cesar Chavez
"Compassion will no longer be seen as a spiritual luxury for a contemplative few; rather it will be viewed as a social necessity for the entire human family."
- Duane Elgin
"Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you must do is put it on."
- James Baldwin
"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
"The hardest battle you're ever going to fight is the battle to be just you."
- Leo Buscaglia
"Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well."
- Vincent van Gogh
"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."
- Aldous Huxley
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
- Oscar Wilde
"Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn."
- Alice Miller
"Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to the path which nature has marked out for him."
- Johann von Goethe
"Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is."
- Baruch Spinoza
"Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness."
- Viktor Frankl
"He who allows oppression shares the crime."
- Desiderius Erasmus
"The glue that holds all relationships together - including the relationship between the leader and the led - is trust, and trust is based on integrity."
- Brian Tracy
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement."
- Golda Meir
"The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is."
- Desiderius Erasmus
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
- Ray Bradbury
"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
"Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence."
- Dorothy Thompson
"The best safeguard against fascism is to establish social justice to the maximum extent possible."
- Arnold Toynbee
"Reverence is an organic human experience that requires no supernatural explanations."
- Kendyl Gibbons
"The 'trickle-down' theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals."
- William Blum
"Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it - a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals."
- Albert Schweitzer
"Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom."
- Aldous Huxley
"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."
- George Orwell
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
"The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow."
- Jim Hightower
"Amidst the worldly comings and goings, observe how endings become beginnings."
- Lao Tzu
"I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water."
- D. H. Lawrence
"The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction."
- Christopher Lasch
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
- Howard Zinn
"The real voyage of discovery comes, not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
- Sofia Smallstorm
"If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
- Laurence J. Peter
"The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are."
- Bo Lozoff
"The most powerful moral influence is example."
- Huston Smith
"No one has ever become poor by giving."
- Anne Frank
"The true civilization is where every man gives to every other man every right he claims for himself."
- Robert G. Ingersoll
"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."
- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
"Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"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
"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."
- Howard Zinn
"Where there is power, there is resistance."
- Foucault
"You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun."
- Florynce Kennedy
"To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground."
- Stephen Covey
"The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying."
- Sydney J. Harris
"We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."
- Terence McKenna
"Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act."
- Albert Einstein
"There is an ancient Indian saying: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." If we use this ethic as a moral compass, then our rendezvous with reality can also become a rendezvous with opportunity."
- Pat Schroeder
"People living deeply have no fear of death."
- Anais Nin
"The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish."
- Terence McKenna
"You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness."
- Terence McKenna
"Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility."
- Robin Morgan
"Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship."
- A. Philip Randolph
"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
- Robert M. Hutchins
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives."
- Robert A. Heinlein
"Choosing not to act on an angry impulse and to feel the pain that lies beneath it is a very courageous thing to do."
- Gary Zukav
"The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away."
- David Viscott
"If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed."
- Terence McKenna
"If you want to enjoy the rainbow, be prepared to endure the storm."
- Warren Wendel Wiersbe
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness, and in human responsibility."
- Vaclav Havel
"When technology surpasses a civilization's spiritual wisdom, it is almost inevitable that its destruction will ensue."
- Anonymous
"I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose."
- George Carlin
"Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others."
- Buddha
"Revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst."
- Walter Weckler
"The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words."
- Rachel Naomi Remen
"The food you eat can either be the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison."
- Anne Wigmore
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty."
- Thomas Jefferson
"In our deepest moments of struggle, frustration, fear, and confusion, we are being called upon to reach in and touch our hearts. Then, we will know what to do, what to say, how to be. What is right is always in our deepest heart of hearts. It is from the deepest part of our hearts that we are capable of reaching out and touching another human being."
- Roberta Sage Hamilton
"The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it."
- Simone Weil
"Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization."
- Stephen Jay Gould
"I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders."
- Leo Tolstoy
"Thoughts produce actions - look at what you're thinking."
- Sir Laurence Olivier
"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."
- Mohandas Gandhi
"It is not the answer that enlightens but the question."
- Eugene Ionesco
"How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?"
- Howard Zinn
"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
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
- Howard Zinn
"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
"He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still."
- Lao Tzu
"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."
- David Friedman
"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."
- Bertrand Russell
"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
"Happiness comes when you believe in what you are doing, know what you are doing, and love what you are doing."
- Brian Tracy
"The greater the crime perpetrated by the leadership, the less likely it is that the people will ever believe their leaders to be capable of perpetrating such an event."
- Adolf Hitler
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Martin Luther King Jr
"Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse; And a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed."
- Carl Jung
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
- Carl Jung
"Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable."
- Kenyan Proverb
"The love we give away is the only love we keep."
- Elbert Hubbard
"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost."
- Arthur Ashe
"When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is."
- Tara Brach
"I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum."
- Frances Willard
"The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose."
- Ayn Rand
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
- Ayn Rand
"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
"It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you become really committed to winning, and a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom."
- Robin Morgan
"I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being."
- Hafiz of Persia
"Freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged."
- Alice Walker
"Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born."
- Dale Turner
"Our attitude in the face of life's challenges determines our suffering or our freedom."
- Tara Brach
"The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully."
- Tara Brach
"90% of the population does nothing called thinking. In fact in English, they have to use the term critical thinking because we have gone so far from thinking we have to hold it up with critical thinking. When is thinking not critical?"
- Patch Adams
"The sleep of reason produces monsters."
- Goya
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
- Dom Helder Camara
"Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire
"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols."
- Aldous Huxley
"Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born."
- Dale Turner
"There's something contagious about demanding freedom."
- Robin Morgan
"Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world's needs."
- Frederick Buechner
"When we find ourselves devoid of passion and purpose, the first thing we need to do is stop. But that's not easy. The rest of the world is zooming by at full speed. Left alone with ourselves, without a project to occupy us, we can become nervous and self-critical about what we should be doing and feeling. This can be so uncomfortable that we look for any distraction rather than allowing ourselves the space to be as we are."
- Dawna Markova
"The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship."
- Deborah Tannen
"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."
- Hannah Arendt
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
- Viktor Frankl
"Genuine politics - even politics worthy of the name - the only politics I am willing to devote myself to - is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole."
- Vaclav Havel
"When psychopaths are the policy makers in government and the CEOs of big business, the way they think and reason - their 'morality' - becomes the common culture and 'morality' of the population over which they preside. When this happens, the mind of the population is infected in the way a pathogen infects a physical body. The only way to protect ourselves against this pathological thinking is to inoculate ourselves against it, and that is done by learning as much as possible about the nature of psychopathy and its influence on us. Essentially, this particular 'disease' thrives in an environment where its very existence is denied, and this denial is planned and deliberate"
- Laura Knight-Jadczyk
"There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
- David Foster Wallace
"Guilt should be a momentary pang to spur one into corrective action. Anything longer is wasted, and worse, selfish."
- Mark Belletini
"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."
- Erica Jong
"People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within."
- Ramona L. Anderson
"The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot."
- William Ellery Channing
"Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. 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
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets."
- Michael Korda
"When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game. The establishment will irritate you, pull your beard and flick your face to make you fight. Because once they've got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is non-violence and humor."
- John Lennon
"We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in the derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves."
- Marshall Rosenberg
"I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."
- Aldous Huxley
"Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence."
- Henri-Frederic Amiel
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility."
- Robin Morgan
"For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt."
- Lillian Hellman
"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire."
- Marshall Ferdinand Foch
"The purpose of religion is to keep the poor from killing the rich."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
"You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."
- Malcom X
"Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower."
- Shigenori Kameoka
"95% of our energy is spent protecting, defending and maintaining our self-image. It is only an image, sheer imagination."
- Assagioli
"Stand for something or you will fall for anything. Today's mighty oak is yesterday's nut that held its ground."
- Rosa Parks
"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions."
- Carter G. Woodson
"You've always had the power right there in your shoes, you just had to learn it for yourself."
- Frank L. Baum (The Wizard of Oz)
"A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion."
- Washington Irving
"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."
- Louis D. Brandeis
"Today I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves."
- Harriet Tubman
"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
"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
"Freedom lies in bold action."
- Robert Frost
"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."
- Stanley Milgram
"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, Jr.
"True civilization is where every man gives to every other man every right he claims for himself."
- Robert G. Ingersoll
"Live truth instead of expressing it."
- Elbert Hubbard
"You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward."
- Amelia Earhart
"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
"I know of absolutely no, and I mean absolutely no means of prevention that would save so many lives as simply to stop fluoridation of our water supply. In point in fact, fluoride causes more cancer death, and causes it faster than any other chemical."
- Dr Dean Burk - Ph D, 34 Years at the National Cancer Institute.
"A life lived with integrity, even if it lacks the trappings of fame and fortune, is a shining star in whose light others may follow in the years to come."
- Denis Waitley
"War is a way of shattering to pieces, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and too intelligent."
- George Orwell
"It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue."
- Sam Adams
"Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am."
- Parker J. Palmer
"The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying."
- Sydney J. Harris
"We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"Ask me not what I have, but what I am."
- Heinrich Heine
"Without dreams, there can be no courage. And without courage, there can be no action."
- Wim Wenders
"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around."
- Leo Buscaglia
"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."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."
- William Jennings Bryan
"The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy."
- Woodrow Wilson
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
- Louis D. Brandeis
"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."
- Peter F. Drucker
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
- Henry David Thoreau
"We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response."
- Sam Nunn
"To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant."
- Amos Bronson Alcott
"It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth, and that we have no way of knowing when our own time is up, that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had."
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
"Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street."
- Zig Ziglar
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
- Anais Nin
"Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point."
- Harold B. Melchart
"Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works."
- Carl Sagan
"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."
- Marshall McLuhan
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always." - Gandhi
