grllopez ~ with freedom and books > grllopez's Quotes

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“These are the times that try men's souls.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“All literature is protest.”
― Richard Wright

“You should not honor men more than truth.”
― Plato

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.”
― John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain

“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

“Stupid people are dangerous.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“...the most delightful and choicest pleasure is that which is hinted at, but never told.”
― Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart

“I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it... I can't eat another bite.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”
― John Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle

“[He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137
(from Montaigne, On sadness)”
― Petrarch

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
― Albert Einstein

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“God also puts His people in the middle of things for the same reason that He put the tree of temptation in the middle of the garden--so that our choice to follow Him would be a conscious, daily one. Every time we publicly choose to live for Christ, He is glorified.”
― Lynn Austin, Pilgrimage: My Journey to a Deeper Faith in the Land Where Jesus Walked