Ty > Ty's Quotes

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]”
― Harry S. Truman

“You deserve to need me, not to have me.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.”
― Julian Bond

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
― Michel Foucault

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. ”
― Michel Foucault

“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
― Paulo Freire

“The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.”
― Paulo Freire

“If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed”
― Paulo Freire

“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

“I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness”
― Erich Segal

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“It should not be a crime to discuss any idea, however outrageous ”
― Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.”
― Anais Nin

“I don't have pet peeves - I have major psychotic fucking hatreds.”
― George Carlin

“Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.”
― Dahlia Lithwick

“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

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters”
― Albert Einstein

“Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”
― Spencer Johnson

“If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.”
― James E. Faust

“Our biggest fear is not in expressing the truth but that we will be attacked or belittled because of our truth.”
― Kelli Wilson, The Clutter Breakthrough: Your Five-Step Solution to Freedom from Clutter Forever

“People don't always get what they deserve in this world.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book