A Melange of John Elder's Favorite Quotations
"Life is a daring adventure, or nothing."
-- Helen Keller
"Let me say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that every revolutionary should be guided by strong feelings of love."
-- Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally."
-- Madeleine L'Engle
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.-- Malcolm X
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing."-- Vincent van Gogh, Letter 136, 24 September 1880
"Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him."
-- Booker T. Washington
"Do not burn yourself out. Be a reluctant enthusiast, a part time crusader, a
half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and
adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.
While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your
friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains. Run the rivers,
breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the
precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your
brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive:
I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with
their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I
promise you this: you will outlive the bastards."
-- Edward Abbey, Author & lover of the wild
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control; it means out of 'their' control."
-- Jim
Dodge
"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must
never be a time when we fail to protest."
-- Elie Wiesel
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis
preserve their neutrality."
-- Dante
"The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the
widespread delusion among the poor that we have a
democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."
-- Father Edward
Dowling (1941)
"How can we re-imagine the world? How can we begin to dream of a world in which there
is no hunger, a world in which there are no homeless people? How can we start dreaming of
a place in which kids do not have to be put aside and forgotten and attacked? How do we
dream this? The answer is within the dream. If you can imagine another world, you are
already beginning to build towards it."
-- Luis
Rodriguez on People's Tribune Radio
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority
keen to set brush fires in people's minds."
-- Samuel Adams
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
-- Niels Bohr
"A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once."
-- Pascal
"Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat!"
-- Bob Wallace
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
"There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive." (p. 5)
"Nothing is given to men, and the little they can conquer is paid for with unjust deaths. But man's greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself." (p. 39)
"Our poisoned hearts must be cured. And the most difficult battle to be won against the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice." (p. 62)
"The world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds." (p. 70)
"I share with you the same revulsion from evil ... I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force ... What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today." (p. 71)
"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." (p. 73)
"And what I know--which sometimes creates a deep longing in me--is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices--millions, I say--throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and men." (p. 74)
"There are some of us who do not want to keep silent about anything. It is our whole political society that nauseates us. Hence there will be no salvation until all those who are still worth while have repudiated it utterly in order to find, somewhere outside insoluble contradictions, the way to a complete renewal. In the meantime we must struggle." (p. 82)
"Totalitarian tyranny is not based on the virtues of the totalitarians. It is based on the mistakes of the liberals." (p. 83)
"I cannot forgive contemporary political society: it is a mechanism for driving men to despair." (p. 83)
"Freedom is the concern of the oppressed, and her natural protectors have always come from among the oppressed." (p. 89)
"We notice that everywhere, together with freedom, justice is profaned. How then can this infernal circle be broken? Obviously, it can be done only by reviving at once, in ourselves and in others, the value of freedom--and by never again agreeing to its being sacrificed, even temporarily, or separated from our demand for justice." (p. 93)
"Freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties." (p. 96)
"We shall be sure that freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all." (p. 97)
"The freedom of each finds its limits in that of others; no one has a right ot absolute freedom. The limit where freedom begins and ends, where its rights and duties come together, is called law, and the State itself must bow to the law." (p. 101)
"When one knows of what man is capable, for better and for worse, one also knows that it is not the human being himself who must be protected but the possibilities he has within him--in other words, his freedom." (p. 102)
"I cannot love all humanity except with a vast and somewhat abstract love. But I love a few men, living or dead, with such force and admiration that I am always eager to preserve in others what will someday perhaps make them resemble those I love." (p. 103)
"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst." (p. 103)
"We shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise." (p. 104)
"People are complaining almost everywhere that the sense of duty is disappearing. How could it be otherwise since no one cares any more about his rights? Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty." (p. 105)
"If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one." (p. 106)
"It is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them, even to win wars." (p. 114)
"I believe only in differences and not in uniformity. First of all, because differences are the roots without which the tree of liberty, the sap of creation and of civilization, dries up." (p. 136)
"The task of men of culture and faith, in any case is not to desert historical struggles nor to serve the cruel and inhuman elements in those struggles. It is rather to remain what they are, to help man against what is oppressing him, to favor freedom against the fatalities that close in upon it." (p. 141)
"Our proudest duty is to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and death, the freedom of that culture--in otherwords, the freedom of work and of creation." (p. 164)
Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
"To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand." (p. 12)
"Revolution is not the uprising against pre-existing order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one."
"Liberalism ... is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet."
"Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity of the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama (the primary radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography)."
"We can quite well turn away from our true destiny, but only to fall a prisoner in the deeper dungeons of that destiny."
"The one thing that can substantially and truthfully be called rebellion is that which consists in not accepting one's own destiny, in rebelling against one's self! The rebellion of the archangel Lucifer would not have been less if, instead of striving to be God--which was not his destiny--he had striven to be the lowest of the angels--equally not his destiny."
"Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man."
"And this is the simple truth--that to live is to feel oneself lost--he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground."
"The man who discovers a new truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes."
"To think is, whether you want or no, to exaggerate. If you prefer not to exaggerate, you must remain silent; or, rather, you must paralyse your intellect and find some way of becoming an idiot."
"The health of democracies, of whatever type and range, depends on a wretched technical detail--electoral procedure. All the rest is secondary. If the regime of the elections is successful, if it is in accordance with reality, all goes well; if not, though the rest progresses beautifully, all goes wrong."
"There is truth only in an existence which feels its acts as irrevocably necessary ... The only life with its roots fixed in earth, the only autochthonous life, is that which is made up of inevitable acts. All the rest, all that it is in our power to take or to leave or to exchange for something else, is mere falsification of life."
Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
"When a person tries to act in accordance with his consience, when he tries to speak the truth, when he tries to behave like a citizen, even in conditions where citizenship is degraded, it won't necessarily lead anywhere, but it might. There's one thing, however, that will never lead anywhere, and that is speculating that such behavior will lead somewhere." (p. xvi)
"It is strange but ultimately quite logical: as soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it." (p. 11)
"If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man." (p. 11)
"It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then 'put it into practice,' but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it--create it, as it were, from the 'material of the world,' articulate it in the 'language of the world." (p. 12)
"The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic strutures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures. The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships--i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences." (p. 13)
"A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in 'systems' cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness." (p. 17)
"The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said., and to whom, why, and how it is said." (p. 67)
"The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him." (p. 72)
"We introduced a new model of behavior: don't get involved in diffuse general ideological polemics with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight 'only' for those concrete causes, and be prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end. In other words, don't get mixed up in backroom wheeling and dealing, but play an open game." (p. 83)
"Every consession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept." (p. 110)
"Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day." (p. 111)
"A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemorality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action." (p. 113)
"Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?" (p. 114)
"Even a purely moral act that haws no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance." (p. 115)
"By the 'self-momentum' of a power or a system, I mean the blind, unconscious, irresponsible, uncontrollable, and unchecked momentum that is no longer the work of people, but which drags people along with it, and therefore manipulates them. It is obvious that this self-momentum is in fact the momentum of impersonal power." (p. 166)
Emma Goldman, Feminist, Anarchist & Pacifist
"If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution." / "If we can’t dance, it’s not a revolution."
"The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society."
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life."
More quotes and commentary can be found at The Anarchist Review.
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