I’ve collected hundreds of quotes at this site. Here is a batch of my newest favorites:
“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, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller
“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
– Tom Waits
The atheist is free to concentrate on the fate of this world — whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital or advocating for tougher gun control laws — without trying to square things with an unseen overlord in the next. Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.
Susan Jacoby – http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/the-blessings-of-atheism.html?pagewanted=all
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
– Chris Hedges
“Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes ‘
I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.
– Elie Weisel
When he was asked if he hated Germans, Elie Weisel replied, “the children of murderers aren’t murderers, just children.”
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ”
– Alvin Toffler
Committee–a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.
Fred Allen (1894 – 1956)
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
– Jeannette Rankin (1880 – 1973)
To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.
– Elbert Hubbard
“When inventing a god, the most important thing is to claim it is invisible, inaudible and imperceptible in every way. Otherwise, people will become skeptical when it appears to no one, is silent and does nothing.” – Anonymous
― Alvin Toffler
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
– Ansel Adams
Omnipotent God chooses not to use his power to simply forgive humankind, but instead implements a solution which requires that he impregnate a teen girl in order to give birth to himself so he can have himself slaughtered to save human beings from the Hell that he created. He then decides to communicate his scheme through conflicting accounts penned decades later by anonymous authors and subjectively handed down by flawed translators who can’t even agree on the interpretation of “virgin.”
– anon
“… Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
So does insanity.