I really like quotes in general, in fact I tend to write down the ones I really like when I find them. =D
I feel like they give nice insight sometimes, even while it's important for people to think about things themselves, quotes seem to have the potential to open doors to new outlooks that may not have been considered before by the person reading them.
Anyways I made this thread with the thought in mind that people could share quotes they've found interesting or really like with everyone.
I have a lot so I'll just start off with some for now to get the thread going. :ran_girl1:
[SPOILER="Spoiler"]
To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.
-Chris Hitchens
The only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,
but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars...
-Jack Kerouac
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
-Kurt Vonnegut
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
It has always seemed strange to me...the things we admire in men--kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling--are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest--sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest--are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.
-John Steinbeck
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
-W.H. Auden
I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
-Ender Wiggin
The most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats.
-Prof. Phillip Agre
Written laws are like spiders webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and the poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
-Anacharsis
It is idle to talk of civil liberties to adults who were systematically taught in adolescence that they had none; and it is sheer hypocrisy to call such people freedom loving.
-Edgar Friedenberg
You ask a lot of kids today what they want to be when they grow up, and they say, “I want to be famous.†You ask them for what reason and they don’t know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future, so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for 15 minutes.
-Banksy
If we could stop talking about music and industry and politics and all that, [we'd] realize that it's far easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.
-Rez [William Gibson]
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
- Elie Wiesel
Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. The wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
-J.K. Rowling
Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.
-Ben Okri
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they can not become conscious
-George Orwell
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation
- Robert F. Kennedy
You often hear people say that history is written by the winners. It really isn’t. The legend of the Lost Cause and the oppressed South dominated understandings of the American Civil War for a long time. The Greeks wrote about how they civilized Rome. The near genocide of America’s native peoples is not an untold story. The power of nationalist and separatist groups demonstrates how history is always contested territory.
History is, in fact, written by people who write it.
-Troy S. Goodfellow
Big Brother, in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector, will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order and the like.
-Justice William O. Douglas
Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion
-Paulo Freire
This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.
-Immanuel Kant
Some people care too much. I think it's called love.
-Winnie the Pooh
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
-Oscar Wilde
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
-Aldous Huxley
War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
-John Stuart Mill
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side
-George Orwell
Everything is edible! Why, even I am edible. But THAT children is called cannibalism, and is frowned upon in most societies... -Willy Wonka
There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness
-Friedrich Nietzche
Passion makes you do what's next, rather than what was, and it makes you disobedient.
-Rick Overton
You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say my name on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say 'Fuck you.' I'm positive.
-Holden Caulfield (J.D. Salinger)
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounding yourself with assholes.
-William Gibson
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
-William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education
The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.
-John Taylor Gatto, NY State Teacher of the Year
We are enveloped and steeped in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
-Charles Baudelaire
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today. -Lawrence Krauss
it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople andourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are humanbeings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying--you and I are not snobs.
We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now'and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.
-ee cummings
Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowledge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies!
-Stéphane Mallarmé
I always hate that moment in documentaries about social movements where somebody insists that whatever incredibly exciting and revolutionary phenomenon they were a part of could never happen again, because the world has inevitably changed for the worse, and today’s kids are just too jaded or clueless to do what they did. What they’re really saying is that it will never happen for them again, because they’ve reached the age where they’re too jaded and clueless. When you’re young, whatever you’re doing feels revolutionary because the world is opening up for you in ways that will never be more exciting than they are right now, in this moment, forever and ever.
-Steven Hyden
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, 'this is the world', but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.
-Haruki Murakami[/SPOILER]