Sayings & Quotes

[Lilith7]

'Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.'
Michael Palin

"Art is the flower. Life is the Green Leaf.
Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful living thing, something that will convince the world that there may be, there are, things more precious more beautiful
– more lasting than life itself."
Rennie Mackintosh


Elisabeth Sandlund, editor of the Swedish Christian newspaper ‘Dagen’: 'I cannot find a single word in the Bible, supporting the idea of same sex marriage.'

K G Hammar, former Arch Bishop of the Church of Sweden, the largest Lutheran church in the world: 'True, but at the same time you will find hundreds of passages supporting the idea that women shouldn't express their opinions in public, so if I were
you, I'd use quotes from the Bible far more cautiously.'


"The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."
William Blake

[Lilith7]

"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."

Winston Churchill


'Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.'
Robert Hugh Benson.


'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.'
Benjamin Franklin

'It's all about money, not freedom, ya'll, okay? Nothing to do with fuckin' freedom. If you think you're free, try going somewhere without fucking money, okay?'
- Bill Hicks

'Self-importance is man's greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one's life offended by something or someone.'
Don Juan

"The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage."
Aneurin Bevan born November 15, 1897, died1960

[Lilith7]

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
Helen Keller

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful & murder respectable."
George Orwell


"They who say that we should love our fellow citizens but not foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which benevolence and justice would perish forever."
Cicero


"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike--and yet it is the most precious thing we have."
Albert Einstein


“We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Martin Luther King

[Lilith7]

Good ol' boy, Southern Baptist Pastor Rogers - 1931-2005. He had a solution for the problem of welfare.

"I believe slavery is a much maligned institution; if we had slavery today, we would not have this welfare mess".


'It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.'
Hubert H. Humphrey


'The difference between what we do & what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.'
Mohandas Gandhi.

'A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbour's.'
Anon

'Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it is time to pause and reflect.'
MarkTwain.

[Lilith7]

'Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.'
George Santayana.


'Hatred is a form of faith, distilled by passion to remove all rationality.'

'Those who do not see money as a tool, but as an objective, will soon find themselves as its tool.'
L E Modesitt

'Deities are invented by fallible & finite beings in the hope & desire to create immortal perfection; unfortunately, such deities only reflect their creators & inspire their followers to similar imperfections.

Human religions are based upon the twin assumptions that physical corporeality is a weakness & that an intelligent noncorporeal deity would provide superior guidance. Both assumptions are wrong.'

L. E. Modesitt

“Artists are the people chosen by the society to be reckless & say things that are not normally said.
I don’t think any artist should be subject to any responsibility in that sense."
Hanif Kureishi

[Lilith7]

"The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence."
William Harwood


"A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a f______g cross? It's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant.”
Bill Hicks

"Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being. For the Jews, Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is master by divine right; the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female."

Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex


"The right to liberty is a part of the right to life, specifically referring to your freedom of action. You may do what you want, when you want, provided you don't trample on the rights of anyone else"
John Locke

“Racial prejudice is a
PIGMENT OF THE IMAGINATION"
Anon

[Lilith7]

"Education is the process whereby one goes from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty."
Kenneth G. Johnson

"Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law."
Oliver Goldsmith

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."
Elizabeth Kubler Ross.


"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls.
The most massive characters are seared with scars."
Kahlil Gibran.

"Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of JUSTICE. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is manmade...." -

Nelson Mandela

[Lilith7]

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay"
Oliver Goldsmith


''Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.''
Dale Carnegie


''Real charity doesn't care if it's tax-deductible or not.''
Dan Bennett


"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts."
Mahatma Gandhi

"I can’t for the life of me imagine that God will say ‘I will punish you because you’re black, you should have been white; I will punish you because you’re a woman, you should have been a man; I will punish you because you’re homosexual, you should have been heterosexual.’ I can’t for the life of me believe those things."
Archbishop Desmond Tutu


"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, & applying the wrong remedies."
Groucho Marx

[Lilith7]

"When the human spirit, after years of imprisonment in the cage & dungeons of the body, is at last set free, & wings its flight to the Source whence it came, is this not an occasion for rejoicing, & thanks, & dancing?"

Jalal Al-Din, Sufi poet.


"It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle & quiet we become towards the defects of others."

Joseph Addison

"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."
Carl Sagan


“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody-not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms-had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs).
Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”
Christopher Hitchens

"Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid."

George Carlin

[Lilith7]

"The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes."
George Eliot.

"Never do to others what would pain thyself."
Panchatantra 111.104, Hindu


"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening
than when they are convinced beyond doubt
that they are right."
Laurens van der Post


"Some scientist say that the major building block of the universe is hydrogen because it's the most plentiful element but my theory is the universe is made of stupidity because it is MORE plentiful than hydrogen."
-fz

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; & the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too."
Somerset Maugham


"The love of liberty is the love of others;
the love of power is the love of ourselves."
W C Hazlitt


“May you have the hindsight to know where you have been,
the foresight to know where you’re going,
and the insight to know when you’re going too far.”
Anon

"If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us real candidates."
Jay Leno

"The problem with political jokes is.....they get elected."
Henry Cate, VII

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river."
Nikita Khrushchev

[Lilith7]

'When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.'
Clarence Darrow

'Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.'
John Quinton

"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country. "
Tex Guinan

"I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. "
Charles de Gaulle

" Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks."
Doug Larson


"Some people are good spellers. Some people are good haters. But the two rarely coincide."
Anon

"Acts of love and kindness never die
But in the lives of others multiply."
Anon


"A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth."
Edward De Bono.

[Lilith7]

"There never was a child so lovely
but his mother was glad to get him asleep."
Ralph Waldo Emerson


"Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence."
Christopher Hitchens


"Be humble for you are made of earth
Be noble for you are made of stars."
Serbian proverb

'Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.'
Albert Schweitzer

[Lilith7]

'There is no path to peace- Peace is the path.'
Gandhi

'The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.'
Gloria Steinem


SNOLLYGOSTERS:
1. One, especially a politician, who is guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent, respectable principles.

2. A politician who will go to any lengths to win public office, regardless of party affiliation or platform.


Spermologer (n) A picker-up of trivia, of current news, a gossip monger.


"I think our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends, I think they’re all insane. But I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what is insane about it. Don’t you agree?"
John Lennon

'Perhaps, if you weren't so busy regarding my shortcomings, you'd find that I do possess redeeming qualities, discreet as they may be. I notice when the sky is blue. I smile down at children. I laugh at any innocent attempt at humour. I quietly carry the burdens of others as though they were my own. And I say 'I'm sorry' when you don't. I am not without fault, but I am not without goodness either.'
Richelle E. Goodrich


"Women like silent men.
They think they are listening."
Anon

"Women have served all these centuries as
looking-glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of
a man at twice its natural size."
Virginia Woolf

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
Voltaire.

”Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire

"Poverty is not a lack of character.
It is a lack of money.
A lack of opportunity.
A lack of investment.
It is when society turns its back & makes you invisible."
Anonymous


'I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.'
Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Lilith7]

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.”
Terry Pratchett


"Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity ,it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU, can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom."
Nelson Mandela.

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.
It is through disobedience & rebellion that progress has been made."

Oscar Wilde



'At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.'
Anon

"To know that you have enough is to be rich."
Lao Tzu

[Lilith7]

'Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true.'
Hubert H. Humphrey


'Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.'
Derek Jarman


'Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?'
Ted Olson


‘Our strategy should be not only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it.
To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - & our ability to tell our own stories.

Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: we be many & they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’

Arundhati Roy



“So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, ‘They are poor, only because they are idle’.

John Wesley


'They say they're preserving 'the sanctity of marriage' which means that two gay men who've been together for twenty-five years can't get married, but a heterosexual guy can still get drunk in Vegas and marry a hooker at the Elvis chapel. The sanctity of marriage has been saved!'
Lea DeLaria

[Lilith7]

'When women got the vote, they did not redefine voting. When African-Americans got the right to sit at a lunch counter alongside white people, they did not redefine eating out. They were simply invited to the table. That is all we want to do; we have no desire to change marriage. We want to be entitled to not only the same privileges but the same responsibilities as straight people.'
Cynthia Nixon

'Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune's bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.'
John Greenleaf Whittier



‘To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge each rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there’s more idleness & abuse of govt favours among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.'

Norman Mailer


'Look, a village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot. It’s as simple as that, and we have to understand: we have a village idiot in this country. It’s called fundamentalist Christianity.'

Sam Harris

"We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate. "
Lydia Maria Francis Child

'The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. '
~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

[Lilith7]

'People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.'
James Baldwin

'One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.'
Simone de Beauvoir

'My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.'
Billy Connolly

'The internet is full of fraudulent quotes of famous people.'
Benjamin Franklin

"Turn that crap down!"
Mozart's father

[Lilith7]

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1758


"As the government of the United States of America is NOT IN ANY SENSE FOUNDED ON THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION,--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquillity of Musselmen,--and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mohammedan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever interrupt the harmony existing between the two countries."
George Washington


'The problem with secularism is not intolerance, as Tory peer Baroness Warsi claims; it’s snobbery.
Intellectual snobbery, actually. Secularists see religious people as none too bright. Sorry.
Honestly, no offence intended, but to a non-believer, the leap of logic required to aithfully invest in the concept of a supernatural being — one that is turned to in times of minor personal crisis but takes a laissez-faire approach to war and genocide — is so great as to appear little short of ridiculous.
So a person with faith appears ridiculous, too.

I know this is wrong. I know this is judgmental. I admire a lot of the principles of religious faith.
I am certainly not intolerant of those who wish to behave charitably towards their fellow man.
But the logic. I cannot get beyond the logic.
‘How can you believe that?’ I wonder. ‘You seemed so sensible.’
Baroness Warsi


"I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top."
Frank Moore Colby


"People who dismiss the unemployed as parasites, fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognised by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such, is the ruling class in a capitalist society"
J Read

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borge


"She's the sort of woman who lives for others--you can tell the others by their hunted expression."
C. S. Lewis

[Lilith7]

"When old folks laugh, they free the world."
Maya Angelou


"Racism is a blight on the human conscience. The idea that any people can be inferior to another, to the point where those who consider themselves superior define and treat the rest as subhuman, denies the humanity even of those who elevate themselves to the status of gods." From address to UK Houses of Parliament 1996.


"As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave my hatred & bitterness behind, I’d still be in prison."

Nelson Mandela

"My friend Wilbur Ferry used to say that you could classify people by their response to the verse in Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"----"I was walkin' down a ribbon of highway, saw a sign, it said 'No Trespassin'/ But on the other side, it didn't say nothin', that side was made for you and me." If it scandalizes you, you're a Republican; if it makes you smile and want to clap, there's hope for you."
Hal Crowther


"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it."
Chinese proverb



"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."
Germaine Greer


"I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery."
Jean Jacques Rousseau


"Man is the missing link between apes and human beings".
Konrad Lorenz

[Lilith7]

"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians."
Edward Langley

"A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own."
H.G. Wells


"The biggest threat to any society is its own young males between 14 & 24"

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

""One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
Carl Sagan


"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But, I repeat myself. "
Mark Twain


"Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; & it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man."
Schopenhauer


"Living with a saint is more gruelling than being one."
Robert Neville.