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Connexions Quotations
Miscellaneous
Quotes
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I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.
- Dorothy Sayers
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The myth that playgrounds and grass and hired guards or supervisors are innately wholesome for children and that city streets, filled with ordinary people, are innately evil for children, boil down to a deep contempt for ordinary people.
- Jane Jacobs
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If you expect to see the final results of your work you have not asked a big enough question.
- I.F. Stone
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The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.
- Bertrand Russell
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Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
- Simone de Beauvoir
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As a rule I don’t believe in poverty and suffering as a way of learning anything,
but in my case the hardship and starvation of my inept queer life have usefully simplified my notions of what a good society is.
As with any other addict who cannot get an easy fix, they have kept me in close touch with material hunger.
So I cannot take the Gross National Product very seriously, nor status and credentials,
nor grandiose technological solutions, nor ideological politics, including ideological liberation movements.
For a starving person, the world has got to come across in kind. It doesn’t.
I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself: things like clean air, green grass,
children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that suits one’s abilities, plain tasty food, and occasional satisfying nookie.
- Paul Goodman
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Better do a good deed near at home than go far away to burn incense.
- Amelia Earhart
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For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce,
out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.
- Northrop Frye
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I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind;
yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
- Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet
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In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.
It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being.
We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
- Albert Schweitzer
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The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal,
but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society ...
is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.
- Karl Marx
Grundrisse
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Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
- Karl Marx
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
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Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.
- Anton Chekhov
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Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
- Arundhati Roy
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Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them,
you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
– Anon
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Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.
- Joni Mitchell
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Every person who has ever achieved anything has been knocked down many times.
But all of them picked themselves up and kept going, and that is what I have always tried to do.
- Wangari Maathai
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Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.
- Emily Dickinson
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I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.
I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.
Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
- Bertrand Russell
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I can resist everything except temptation.
- Oscar Wilde
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I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.
- Rosa Parks
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I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
- George Bernard Shaw
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If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.
- Yogi Berra
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If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
- Abraham Lincoln
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If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
- Yogi Berra
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It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
- Aesop
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It is not enough to think, one also has to breathe. Dangerous are the thinkers who have not breathed enough.
- Elias Canetti
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It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.
- Miguel de Cervantes
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Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words.
- Ecclesiastes
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Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
- John Lennon
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The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
- Samuel Johnson
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The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
- Samuel Johnson
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Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
- G.W.F. Hegel
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One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
- A.A. Milne
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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
- Karl Marx
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Power to the imagination.
- Graffiti, Paris May 1968
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Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
- Wendell Berry
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The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
- Bertrand Russell
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Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be.
- Karl Marx
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Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
- Karl Marx
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Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
- Wendell Berry
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There are three classes of people, those who see, those who see when they are shown and those who do not see.
- Leonardo da Vinci
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The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Arthur C. Clarke
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There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
- Albert Schweitzer
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There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all... What is it? Distrust.
- Demosthenes
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To Every Complex Problem there is a Simple Answer:
Neat, Plausible, and Wrong.
- H.L. Mencken
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To gaze into the glassy eyes of anyone 100 per cent certain of their special place in this world and the next isn’t a cheering experience. The closed mind, no matter what it is closed against, is as much a hazard to the planet as a nuclear stockpile and there are few things so thoroughly bolted and barred as the mind with a god locked inside – Houdini himself couldn’t get in or out. Doubt is anathema to it, yet doubt is the only truly human condition, our burden but also our glory, and to reject doubt’s saving grace turns us into so many robots with floppy discs where our brains should be.
- Jill Tweedie
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To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity.
- Thomas Paine
Common Sense
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Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
- Aldous Huxley
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Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
- Mae West
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The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.
- Graffiti, Paris May 1968
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We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.
- Cesar Chavez
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While we’re talking, envious time is fleeing: seize the day, put no trust in the future.
- Horace, Odes
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Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
- George Orwell
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Why do people who know the least know it the loudest?
- George Carlin
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Without contraries is no progression. Attractions and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
- William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.
- Bertrand Russell
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The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
- Thomas Paine
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You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone’s thumb.
- Nancy Banks-Smith
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