"It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous slavish shore. But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!" Herman Melville
"whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud" Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
"Ses mensonges sont les seules réalités, et, pour peu qu'on les aime d'un amour véritable, l'existence de ces choses qui sont autour de nous et qui nous subjuguaient, diminue peu à peu ; le pouvoir de nous rendre heureux ou malheureux se retire d'elles pour aller croître dans notre âme où nous convertissons la douleur en beauté." Marcel Proust, à propos de l'art
"[Men today] constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good." T. S. Eliot
"I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him." Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." Henry David Thoreau
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." Archbishop Desmond Tutu
"Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognise others as persons - not by those who are oppressed, exploited and unrecognised." Paulo Freire
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
"Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
"Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King, Jr.
"La violence n'est pas un moyen parmi d'autres d'atteindre la fin, mais le choix délibéré d'atteindre la fin par n'importe quel moyen." Jean-Paul Sartre
"Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love." Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." Martin Luther King, Jr.
"… there would be no more force when after the revolution nobody lived off another man's work. … Police, governments, armies, presidents, kings … all that is force. Force is not real; it is illusion. The working man makes all that himself because he believes it. The day that we stop believing in money and property it will be like a dream when we wake up. We will not need bombs or barricades … Religion, politics, democracy all that is to keep us asleep … Everybody must go round telling people: Wake up!" John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
"… I don't think a flourishing businessman is the highest ideal of human endeavor." John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
"Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves." John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
"Contre l'hiver ils ont la rue, contre la neige ils ont la nudité, contre la faim ils ont le tas d'ordures voisin..." Victor Hugo
"The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love." Allen Ginsberg, Song
"the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse" Allen Ginsberg, Howl
"America why are your libraries full of tears?" Allen Ginsberg, America
"I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
…
Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!" Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Quand il faudra fermer le livre,
ce sera sans regretter rien.
J'ai vu tant de gens si mal vivre,
et tant de gens, mourir si bien." Louis Aragon
"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
"Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust." T. S. Eliot, The Waste land
"And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;" T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
"Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad." George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The air is full of cries. But habit is a great deadener." Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
"The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops." Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
"I am defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Plus je songe à la vie humaine, plus je crois qu'il faut lui donner pour témoins et pour juges l'Ironie et la Pitié… L'Ironie et la Pitié sont deux bonnes conseillères; l'une, en souriant, nous rend la vie aimable; l'autre, qui pleure, nous la rend sacrée. L'Ironie que j'invoque n'est point cruelle. Elle ne raille ni l'amour ni la beauté. Elle est douce et bienveillante. Son rire calme la colère, et c'est elle qui nous enseigne à nous moquer des méchants et des sots, que nous pourrions, sans elle, avoir la faiblesse de haïr." Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Épicure
"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Un jour viendra où je serai parmi
Les constructeurs d'un vivant édifice,
La foule immense où l'homme est un ami." Paul Éluard, La puissance de l'espoir
"… love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove:
o, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
that looks on tempests and is never shaken;
it is the star to every wand'ring bark,
whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come;
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even to the edge of doom..." William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
"The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition – and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." Joseph Conrad
“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” James Joyce
“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
“There are only two flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of democratic socialism and the black flag of capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon.” George Bernard Shaw
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; ... It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." Martin Luther King, Jr.
“There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.“ Herman Melville
"Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way." W. B. Yeats, To the Rose upon the Rood of Time
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." Aldous Huxley
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? ... And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth." George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
"Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? ... in all that what truth will there be?" Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
