"I am a living member of the great family of all souls; and I cannot improve or suffer myself, without diffusing good or evil around me through an ever-enlarging sphere. I belong to this family. I am bound to it by vital bonds.”
- William Ellery Channing
"We have castrated society through fear and intimidation. Its manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easily ruled. As all geldings in nature, their thoughts are not involved with the concerns of the future and their posterity, but only with the present toil and the next meal.”
- Harold Wallace Rosenthal
"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
"Stand for something or you will fall for anything. Today's mighty oak is yesterday's nut that held its ground.”
- Rosa Parks
"In a Republic, who is 'the country? Is it the Government, which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”
- Mark Twain
"We can not have equilibrium in this world with the current inequality and destruction of Mother Earth. Capitalism is what is causing this problem and it needs to end.”
- Evo Morales
"There is no saint without a past, and no sinner without a future.”
- Shri Haidakhan Babaji
"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.”
- Carl Bard
"We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it.”
- Sharon Salzberg
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.”
- Cesar Chavez
"Failure is a judgment, an opinion. It stems from your fears, which can be eliminated by love - love for yourself, love for what you do, love for others, and love for your planet.”
- Wayne Dyer
"Either war is obsolete or men are.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
"There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders.”
- Ralph Bunche
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
- Jeanette Rankin
"Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”
- Blaise Pascal
"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
"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
- Howard Zinn
"We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”
- Howard Zinn
"We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.”
- Marcel Proust
"There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.”
-John Dewey
"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”
- William Blum
"Lying is done with words and also with silence.”
- Adrienne Rich
"Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
- Stephen Covey
"A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.”
- Rowan D. Williams
"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
"Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.”
- Alice Miller
"Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.”
- Deborah Tannen
"When we speak, in gestures or signs, we fashion a real object in the world; the gesture is seen, the words and the song are heard. The arts are simply a kind of writing, which, in one way or another, fixes words or gestures, and gives body to the invisible.”
- Alain
"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life - happiness, freedom, and peace of mind - are always attained by giving them to someone else.”
- Peyton Conway March
"People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.”
- Rabindranath Tagore
"The Humanist rarely loses the feeling of at-homeness in the universe. The Humanist is conscious of being an earth-child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging. Memories of one's long ancestry still linger in muscle and nerve, in brain and germ cell. On moonlit nights, in the renewal of life in the springtime, before the glory of a sunset, in moments of swift insight, people feel the community of their own physical being with the body of mother earth. Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, the earthling has a secure feeling of being at home, and a consciousness of pride and dignity as a bearer of the heritage of the ages.”
- A. Eustace Haydon
"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
- Henry David Thoreau
"Men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good.”
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the fuck the Israeli authorities are doing.”
- Sinead O'Connor
"I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason - that history is a protective armor against being misled.”
- Howard Zinn
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
- Maya Angelou
"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”
- Aldous Huxley
"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
"Live each day as if your life had just begun.”
- Goethe
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”
- Thomas Paine
"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”
- Norman Schwarzkopf
"To put forth power in such a way as to be provocative of power in others is the ethical aim that should guide men in all vocations and in all their relations.”
- Felix Adler
"Each man has his own fortune in his hands; as the artist has a piece of rude matter, which he is to fashion to a certain shape. But the art of living rightly is like all arts: the capacity alone is born with us; it must be learned, and practiced with incessant care.”
- Goethe
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”
- Cicero
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
- George Santayana
"There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.”
- Johann Kaspar Lavater
"If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
- Marcus Aurelius
"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.”
- Shirley Chisholm
"To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.”
- William Penn
"The cosmos is neither moral or immoral; only people are. He who would move the world must first move himself.”
- Edward Ericson
"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.”
- Albert Einstein
"Each man has his own fortune in his hands; as the artist has a piece of rude matter, which he is to fashion to a certain shape. But the art of living rightly is like all arts: the capacity alone is born with us; it must be learned, and practiced with incessant care.”
- Goethe
"The government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”
- Mark Twain
"Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.”
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
"Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.”
- Buddha
"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
- John Wesley
"You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”
- Pearl S. Buck
"Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.”
- Michael Korda
"Great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if, under the influence of money or power, he neglect justice and virtue?”
- Plato
"The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.”
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Mans duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.”
- Immanuel Kant
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
- Marcus Aurelius
"The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into action.”
- Madame de Stael
"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”
- Marshall Ferdinand Foch
"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
"The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”
- David Viscott
"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.
"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
- Henry James
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.”
- Somerset Maugham
"Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”
- Maria Mitchell
"Light tomorrow with today.”
- Elizabeth Browning
"It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not enough to have wishes, one must also accomplish.”
- Goethe
"Guilt should be a momentary pang to spur one into corrective action. Anything longer is wasted, and worse, selfish.”
- Mark Belletini
"It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.”
- Ralph Ellison
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The infant is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that encounter the horizon of all unlimited being opens itself for him, revealing four things to him: (1) that he is one in love with his mother, even in being other than his mother, and therefore all being is one; (2) that love is good, therefore all being is good; (3) that that love is true, therefore all being is true; and (4) that that love evokes joy, therefore all being is beautiful.”
- Hans Urs von Balthasar
"Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.”
- Samuel Johnson
"All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then your low words will be charged with dynamite.”
- Elbert Hubbard
"Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.”
- Sinclair Lewis
"The real meaning of jewish power is the capacity to silence any discussion of jewish power.”
- Gilad Atzmon (The Wandering Who)
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.”
- Thomas Edison
"What the world needs most is openness: Open hearts, open doors, open eyes, open minds, open ears, open souls.”
- Robert Muller
"Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.”
- Henry Ward Beecher
"This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.”
- Euripides
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
- Martin Luther King Jr
"You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”
- Malcom X
"Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.”
- Parker J. Palmer
"The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred.”
- Tony Horwitz
"Mans duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.”
- Immanuel Kant
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
- George Santayana
"Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain.”
- Sharon Salzberg
"If you think you are too small to be affective you have never been in bed with a mosquito.”
- Dante
"No matter what they ever do to us, we must always act for the love of our people and the earth. We must not react out of hatred against those who have no sense.”
- John Trudell
"To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in someone else.”
- Tenzin Gyatso
"A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness toward themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also inharmonious and confused.”
- Chogyam Trungpa
"We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”
- Edward W. Said
"Everybody wants peace. That's a truism. There is no point in accomplishing through war what you can accomplish through peace."
- Norman Finkelstein
"We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians."
- Nelson Mandela
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality."
- Dante Aleghieri
"Action is the antidote to despair."
- Joan Baez
"It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse."
- Deborah Tannen
"It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot."
- Anatole France
"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
"One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."
- Chinese proverb
"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."
- Melody Beattie
"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."
- Hans Hofmann
"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. It is, after all, one heart touching another heart."
- Roberta Sage Hamilton
"A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness toward themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also inharmonious and confused."
- Chogyam Trungpa
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
- Maya Angelou
"I am a living member of the great family of all souls; and I cannot improve or suffer myself, without diffusing good or evil around me through an ever-enlarging sphere. I belong to this family. I am bound to it by vital bonds."
- William Ellery Channing
"Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination."
- Christian Nevell Bovee
"Wickedness sucks in the greater part of its own venom, and poisons itself therewith."
- Michel de Montaigne
"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so foaming, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility."
- Soren Kierkegaard
"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
- Pablo Picasso
"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
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."
- George Santayana
"It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties."
- Alice Miller
"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 some day in life you will have been all of these."
- George Washington Carver
"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are."
- Anne Lamott
"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life - happiness, freedom, and peace of mind - are always attained by giving them to someone else."
- Peyton Conway March
"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
- Voltaire
"All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State."
- Albert Camus
"People may be said to resemble not the bricks of which a house is built, but the pieces of a picture puzzle, each differing in shape, but matching the rest, and thus bringing out the picture."
- Felix Adler
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right."
- Eugene Debs
"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
"A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn't mean we don't run and jump and dance about. It means there's no compulsiveness. We don't overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm."
- Pema Chodron
"Apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."
- Paulo Freire
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
- Marcus Aurelius
"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian."
- Dennis Wholey
"The government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
- Mark Twain
"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
"Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand."
- Shel Silverstein
"Government has almost always been a barrier against which intellect has had to struggle; and society has made its chief progress by the minds of private individuals, who have outstripped their rulers, and gradually shamed them into truth and wisdom."
- William E. Channing
"Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power."
- Madame de Stael
"Character is the indelible mark that determines the only true value of all people and all their work."
- Orison Swett Marden
"It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue."
- Sam Adams
"Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be."
- Zig Ziglar
"Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance."
- Thomas Carlyle
"Consumption patterns continue at the expense of the environment and peaceful co-existence. The choice is ours."
- Wangari Maathai
"Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world."
- Jane Addams
"It's easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
- Frederick Douglass
"Without fear, we are able to see more clearly our connections to others. Without fear, we have more room for understanding and compassion. Without fear, we are truly free."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by the world, but by a million possible worlds."
- Colin Wilson
"We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others."
- Blaise Pascal
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
- Marie Curie
"The most powerful moral influence is example."
- Huston Smith
"Schools fail us in every sense of the word fail. No doubt there might be some exceptions and no doubt some people will disagree. But here, this statement is not made with any degree of superficiality. The subject is too serious for that. Having spent a few decades in several countries as a pupil, student, lecturer, researcher, and observer of educational systems, my conclusion is not one based on a single observation. And nowhere is this failure any more evident than in the educating
(conditioning) of people (young and old) not to question the State. From the first year in whatever educational system we attended – where you and I were numbered and counted, stamped and dated – we were taught not to question authority. Children are conditioned (brainwashed) to accept official narratives and to ridicule those who do not. People are taught to obey officials and accept their policies, even after they discover something official is immoral and inhuman. In fact, all systems in society, not just educational systems, reward conformists who unquestioningly accept then espouse official policies, positions, procedures, etc. Though it can easily lead to sycophantism, such behaviour is promoted as the right and only way
of living."
- Keith Allan Noble
"Whatever difficulty you face, there are time-tried ways you can listen your way through. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive."
- Mark Nepo
"Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation."
- Alan Cohen
"Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible."
- Howard Zinn
"Freedom lies in bold action."
- Robert Frost
"The biggest threat to America today is it’s own federal government. Will the Army protect anybody from the FBI? The IRS? The CIA? The Republican Party? The Democratic Party? The biggest dangers we face today don’t even need to sneak past our billion dollar defense system, they issue the contracts for them."
- Frank Zappa
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
"Transformation is not five minutes from now; it's a present activity. In this moment you can make a different choice."
- Jillian Michaels
"We don't get to choose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it."
- Kami Garcia
"It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger that causes anxiety."
- Robert Kegan
"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
"The cure for all ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word 'love.' It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life."
- Lydia Maria Child
"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
"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
"The true means of being misled is to believe oneself finer than the others."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"If you're not confused, you're not paying attention."
- Tom Peters
"The more we know, the better we forgive. Those who feel deeply feel for all living beings."
- Madame de Stael
"Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement."
- Alfred Adler
"Within each day, we have this choice: we can build walls, block ourselves from the light, and suffer a dampness in the soul. Or we can live barely, shine on through, and suffer the nicks of erosion for living in the open."
- Mark Nepo
"Never in human history have such genocide and cruelty been witnessed. Such a genocide was never seen in the time of the pharaohs nor of Hitler nor of Mussolini."
- Mehmet Elkatmi, head of Turkish parliament's human rights commission on Bush's genocide in the Iraq war.
"Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets."
- Michael Korda
"If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again."
- Sharon Salzberg
"Some of the best lessons we ever learn we learn from our mistakes and failures. The error of the past is the wisdom of the future."
- Tryon Edwards
"There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will."
- Hannah Arendt
"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."
- Norman Schwarzkopf
"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
"Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization."
- Stephen Jay Gould
"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
"Conscience is doubtless sufficient to conduct the coldest character into the road of virtue; but enthusiasm is to conscience what honor is to duty; there is in us a superfluity of soul, which it is sweet to consecrate to the beautiful when the good has been accomplished."
- Madame de Stael
"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
"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities."
- David Hume
"Anger is the enemy of nonviolence and pride is a monster that swallows it up."
- Gandhi
"We are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another."
- Marian Wright Edelman
"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up."
- Mark Twain
"Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit."
- Baltasar Gracian
"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, political parties, nations, and eras it's the rule."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"There is no true liberty for the individual except as he finds it in the liberty of all. There is no true security for the individual except as he finds it in the security for all."
- Edwin Markham
"I am a living member of the great family of all souls; and I cannot improve or suffer myself, without diffusing good or evil around me through an ever-enlarging sphere. I belong to this family. I am bound to it by vital bonds."
- William Ellery Channing
"Others are affected by what I am, and say, and do. So that a single act of mine may spread and spread in widening circles, through a nation or humanity. Through my vice I intensify the taint of vice throughout the universe. Through my misery I make multitudes sad. On the other hand, every development of my virtue makes me an ampler blessing to my race. Every new truth that I gain makes me a brighter light to humanity."
- William Ellery Channing
"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience"
- Howard Zinn
"Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world's needs."
- Frederick Buechner
"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth."
- Pema Chodron
"If a person fails to attain freedom, spontaneity, a genuine expression of self, he may be considered to have a severe defect, provided we assume that freedom and spontaneity are the objective goals to be attained by every human being. If such a goal is not attained by the majority of members of any given society, we deal with the phenomenon of 'socially patterned' defect. The individual shares it with many others; he is not aware of it as a defect, and his security is not threatened by the experience of being different, of being an outcast, as it were. What he may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness, is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of mankind, as he knows them. As a matter of fact, his very defect, may have been raised to a virtue by his culture, and thus may give him an enhanced feeling of achievement."
- Erich Fromm
"Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all." - Parker J. Palmer
"What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public."
- Vilhjalmur Stefansson
"Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it."
- Howard Mumford Jones
"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
"Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
- Ayn Rand
"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
"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
"Be the type of individual you would most value as a friend."
- Max Igan
"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears."
- Rudyard Kipling
"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
- Epictetus
"Great are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When there is genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar 'vision statement'), people excel, and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to."
- Peter Senge
"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."
- Charles Mingus
"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
"The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known."
- Pete Seeger
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
- Edith Wharton
"Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful."
- Anomymous
"Happiness comes when you believe in what you are doing, know what you are doing, and love what you are doing."
- Brian Tracy
"Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity."
- Aldous Huxley
"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending."
- Carl Bard
"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
"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
"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
"Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body."
- George Carlin
"Genuine politics - 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
"The highest form of intelligence is the ability to observe without evaluating."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it."
- Dawna Markova
"To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."
- Edward Gibbon
"Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher."
- Parker J. Palmer
"There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago."
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story."
- Linda Hogan
"If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"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
"How the line in life, nature, science, phylosophy, religion constantly returns into itself. The opposite poles become one when the circle is completed. All truth revolves about one center. All is a manifestation of one law."
- Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley
"Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation."
- Brian Tracy
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
- Howard Zinn
"The cure for all ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word 'love.' It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life."
- Lydia Maria Child
"The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth. Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."
- Howard Zinn
"There are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones."
- Elie Wiesel
"Act with kindness, but do not expect gratitude."
- Confucius
