John Lewis

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Khalil Gibron

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Paul Geren, “Burma Diary”, July 30, 1942

To live is to be liable to sorry. All of us in the world are like a group moving over mountains together. The same peril stalks us all. When it touches any one of us it stirs a quality in him which lies deep, which is almost beyond knowing intellectually, which is assuredly beyond definition.

In whomever it is stirred, that one is akin to all other sufferers, with a kinship that cannot be sundered. In so far as people ever understand one another, this is the means of understanding. In tears our souls mingle.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry"

Trivial questions sometimes require deep and expansive knowledge of the cosmos just to answer them.

Chiam Potok, "The Promise"

Human beings don’t live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than a blink of an eye… I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of the eye itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man (or woman) who lives that span, (they) are something. They can fill that tiny span with memory, so that its quality is immeasurably.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.

Claudia Lars, "Tierra de Infancia"

Malo y bueno, mi hija, como todo en este mundo. La sombra y la luz son distintas túnicas de Dios, pero una sin la otra no podrían existir jamás ...

(Bad and good, my daughter, like everything in this world. The shadow and the light are distinct tunics of God, but one without the other could not exist ever ...)

Jonathan Lipp, 2016

There is a disease in this country. Its symptoms include finger pointing as to who is to blame for our economic decline. Its most insidious symptom is the demonization of government and its public servants, especially educators. You may believe that as Americans, we deserve freedom and prosperity. I'm sorry, freedom and prosperity are earned every day, and the currency of freedom and prosperity is education.

Sitting Bull, 1877

Hear me people: We have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

Saul Alinsky, 1972

Don't worry, boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever.

H.G. Wells

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac"

Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there.

Pat Caddell, 1972

I knew this (McGovern's) campaign was too god-damn honest! It was bound to get us in trouble... Now I understand why the North Vietnamese wouldn't agree to elections in the South.

T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Between the idea
And the reality
...
Falls the Shadow

Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac"

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Abraham Lincoln, 1861

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Ken Boulding

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"

Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom.

Jose (Pepe) Mujica

Pertenezco a una generación que quiso cambiar el mundo, fui aplastado, derrotado, pulverizado, pero sigo soñando que vale la pena luchar para que la gente pueda vivir un poco major y con un mayor sentido de igualdad.

(I belong to a generation that wanted to change the world, I was crushed, defeated, pulverized, but I keep on dreaming that it is worth the effort to fight so that the people can live a little better and with a greater sense of equality.)