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Connexions Quotations
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I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.
- Dorothy Sayers
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I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
- Eugene Debs
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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 can understand pessimism, but I don’t believe in it. It’s not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don’t need certainty, only possibility.
- Howard Zinn
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I, for one, will join in with anyone – I don’t care what color you are – as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.
- Malcolm X
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I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
- Abraham Lincoln
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I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.
- Albert Schweitzer
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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 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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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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I like to have my news from different sources; How else find out the truth?
- Alexander Pushkin
(from Boris Godonov)
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I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.
- Leonardo da Vinci
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I might seem to have a number of divergent interests – community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics –
but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature.
I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist.
- Paul Goodman
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I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt.
I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
- Bertrand Russell
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I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
- Studs Terkel
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I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would also be free.
- Rosa Parks
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The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,
i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production,
so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.
The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,
the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The German Ideology
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If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousands years ago, this world would be a madhouse.
- Erich Fromm
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If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for self-interest,
then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy,
will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision-making,
and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim)
to manage society and control social change.
- Noam Chomsky
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If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
- George Orwell
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If someone tells you he is going to make ‘a realistic decision,’ you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
- Mary McCarthy
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If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail.
- Abraham Maslow
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If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.
- Yogi Berra
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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
- Thomas Pynchon
Proverbs for Paranoids
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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 those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
- Howard Zinn
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If unions aren’t needed anymore, why do corporations spend billions to destroy them?
- Anon
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If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
- Noam Chomsky
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If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
- Desmond Tutu
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If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
- Desmond Tutu
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If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics;
its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work,
and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear,
and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech?
In a totalitarian economy, any “political liberties” that the people might retain would simply cease to matter.
If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy,
then what is your vote worth?
- Wendell Berry
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If you can understand that your struggle is also somebody else’s struggle,
or that your different concerns and problems are part of the same struggle,
the potential is created for a stronger more effective movement.
The working class movement has slogan: ‘An injustice to one is an injustice to all.’
If that is your approach you understand that solidarity, co-operation, mutual support,
whatever you want to call it, is at one and the same time a duty to your fellow human beings and an act of rational self-interest.
- Ulli Diemer
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If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
- Albert Einstein
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If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
- Yogi Berra
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If you do not expect it, you will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored.
- Heraclitus
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If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
- Yogi Berra
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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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If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love life.
If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.
- Lewis Mumford
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If you want to privatize something and destroy it, a standard method is first to defund it,
so it doesn’t work anymore, people get upset and accept privatization. This is happening in the schools.
They are defunded, so they don’t work well. So people accept a form of privatization just to get out of the mess.
- Noam Chomsky
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If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.
- Kurt Lewin
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I’m called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.
- Studs Terkel
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Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one.
- John Lennon
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In a higher phase of communist society ... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed
in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
- Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Program
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In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell
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In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercise their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.
- Bertrand Russell
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In every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
- Vandana Shiva
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In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come,
but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.
Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.
Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.
- Karl Marx
Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10
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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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In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.
- Jesus
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In nature’s economy the currency is not money, it is life.
- Vandana Shiva
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In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
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In the real world it is rarely possible to draw political boundaries that correspond with nationality.
Nearly every nation-state and aspiring nation-state contains its own national minorities with conflicting nationalist claims on the same territory.
These national groups are usually intermingled and intermarried, sharing the same physical territory,
the same cities and towns, the same streets, the same bedrooms...
As a result ‘self-determination’
for the majority frequently amounts to denying minorities their ‘right to self-determination’.
- Ulli Diemer
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In this country too, policy is insulated from politics. People can have their opinions; they can even vote if they like.
But the policy goes on its merry way, determined by other forces.
What the public wants is called ‘politically unrealistic.’
Translated into English, that means the major centers of power and privilege are opposed to it.
- Noam Chomsky
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In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.
- Noam Chomsky
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The issue that is not clear to organizers, missionaries, educators, or any outsider,
is simply that if people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation,
then they do not think about it.
Why start figuring out how you are going to spend a million dollars
if you do not have a million dollars or are ever going to have a million dollars
– unless you want to engage in fantasy?
Once people are organized so that they have the power to make changes,
then, when confronted with questions of change,
they begin to think and to ask questions about how to make the changes.
- Saul Alinsky
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It has always seemed strange to me. The things we admire in men – kindness and generosity, openness,
honesty, understanding and feeling – are the concomitants of failure in our system.
And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.
- John Steinbeck
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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought
- John Kenneth Galbraith
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It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer.
- Aeschylus
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It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
- Emiliano Zapata
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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- Utpon Sinclair
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It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
- Aesop
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It is contrary to history to represent work for reforms as a long-drawn out revolution and revolution as a condensed series of reforms.
A social transformation and a legislative reform do not differ according to their duration but according to their content...
people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to
the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.
Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.
If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism.
Our program becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism.
- Rosa Luxemburg
Social Reform or Revolution
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It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.
- Andre Gide
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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 is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces.
- Theodor Adorno
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It is the duty of the press to come forward on behalf of the oppressed...
the first duty of the press now is to undermine all the foundations of the existing political state of affairs.
- Karl Marx
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It makes sense to keep a realistic grasp of the factors that limit and distort the media product,
while at the same time recognizing the many opportunities the media offer to introduce new perspectives and understanding.
Many fine journalists, commentators, and activists have shown how much can be achieved with dedication and commitment.
- Noam Chomsky
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It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
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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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It’s not enough to hold opinions like property. It’s not enough just to listen to opinions,
as though the world were an all-night, call-in radio program.
A true absence of censorship includes the right to make up our own minds, to change our minds,
to act carefully on the basis of our judgment. All this takes time.
It means putting up with a lot of nonsense, some of it dangerous nonsense,
but refuted dangerous nonsense is less perilous than tolerantly ignored dangerous nonsense.
And all this is inefficient. It makes taking other people seriously and expecting to be taken seriously in our turn.
And all this might be too much to expect, given our system of censoring incoming information, ideas, and language.
- J. Kates
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It’s the little things citizens do. That's what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees.
- Wangari Maathai
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“I’ve noticed,” said Mr. Keuner, “that a lot of people are put off by our teaching because we know the answer to everything.
Couldn’t we, in the interests of propaganda, draw up a list of questions which appear to us quite unresolved?”
- Bertolt Brecht
Anecdotes of Mr. Keuner
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