Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Albert Camus
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Bertrand Russell
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Capitalism gives opportunity of initiative to a few; Communism could (though it does not in fact) provide a servile kind of security for all. But if people can rid themselves of the influence of unduly simple theories and the strife that they engender, it will be possible, by a wise use of scientific technique, to provide both opportunity for all and security for all. Unfortunately our political theories are less intelligent than our science, and we have not yet learnt how to make use of our knowledge and our skill in the ways that will do most to make life happy and even glorious.
Carl Jung
A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.
Carl Sagan
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Charles Bukowski
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.
Ernest Hemingway
Being against evil doesn’t make you good.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal.
George Carlin
Careful, if you think too much, they’ll take you away.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society.
What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
John Stuart Mill
One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.
The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The most improper job of any man… is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
Leonardo da Vinci
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
Marcus Aurelius
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Margaret Atwood
If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Mark Twain
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Michel Foucault
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
Plato
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.
The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.
There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.
Seneca
The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.
Simone de Beauvoir
All oppression creates a state of war.
Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
SunTzu
Victory comes from finding opportunity in problems.
Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.
Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Thich Nhat Hanh
To be beautiful means to be yourself, you don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don't try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.
Thucydides
When will there be justice in Athens? There will be justice in Athens when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.
Other Voices
For these sections without caricature the quote comes first, the cited person after. In case you are using text-to-speech be aware.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny, and it is useless for the innocent to try by reasoning to get justice, when the oppressor intends to be unjust.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant ... must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.
Aesop
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.
Bell Hooks
Politics, as a practice, whatever its profession, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Brooks Adams
People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.
C. Wright Mills
The trouble is you won't fight. You've given up. But there's something just as inevitable as death. And that's life. Think of the power of the universe - turning the Earth, growing the trees. That's the same power within you - if you'll only have the courage and the will to use it.
Charlie Chaplin
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
Charles de Gaulle
Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.
Charles J. Chaput
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of Earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
C.S. Lewis
Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
David Hume
Let a king recall that it is better to improve his realm than to increase his territory.
Desiderius Erasmus
We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.
Dorothy Day
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
Frank Herbert
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Frédéric Bastiat
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass
The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong.
Georges Bidault
Why not keep this resource at your fingertips?
Other Voices
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
Haile Selassie I
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Hannah Arendt
Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.
Haruki Murakami
In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
Herodotus
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws: but freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.
John Locke
The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.”
Joost A.M. Meerloo
A drop of ink may make a million think.
Lord Byron
Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.
Mary Boykin Chesnut
There has been a deepening recognition among elites in the West that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. And in the United States, that recognition has reached its apogee.
I don't know what word in the language… applies to people of that kind who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life… so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets.
Noam Chomsky
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
Philip K. Dick
He that would govern others, first should be Master of himself.
Philip Massinger
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.
Potter Stewart
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.
Samuel Richardson
I ask for no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.
Sarah Moore Grimké
The hallmark of weak leadership is the need for absolute control.
Most with power care not for fairness, never mind “Justice”. In the end, power is its own end to most, to be used to its own advantage.
Sean Thompson
Lust of absolute power is more burning than all the passions.
Tacitus
We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.
Terence McKenna
The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.
My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine
Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.
Yuval Noah Harari
