A Curated Selection of Quotes (December 2024)
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"If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain."
- Emily Dickinson
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"Don’t show up because you feel like it. Show up because you said you would."
- Seth Godin
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"The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them."
- Turkish proverb
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“No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.”
— Karl Popper
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"Poetry is life distilled."
- Gwendolyn Brooks
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"Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view."
- Paul Klee
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"A rising tide can miss some boats."
- Anonymous
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"Leadership requires action: daring to take steps that are necessary but unpopular, challenging the status quo in order to reach a brighter future."
- Benazir Bhutto
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"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
- Unknown (sometimes attributed to Warren Buffett)
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"A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
- Joseph Conrad
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“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed.”
— Hannah Arendt
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“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
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“A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid.”
— Michel de Montaigne
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“Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
— Ray Bradbury
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“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
― Frank Herbert
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“The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.”
— Hannah Arendt
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“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.”
— Hannah Arendt
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“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
— Hannah Arendt
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"Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak–and speak in such a way that people will remember it."
- Mozart
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“The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.”
— Charlie Chaplin
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“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”
― Simone de Beauvoir
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“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston
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“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
— John Steinbeck
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"My self-imposed mandate is to be the voice for the voiceless."
- Dionne Warwick
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“A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
— Virginia Woolf
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“Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.”
— Denis Diderot
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"Just knowing you don't have the answers is a recipe for humility, openness, acceptance, forgiveness, and an eagerness to learn—and those are all good things."
- Dick Van Dyke
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“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
— Hermann Hesse
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“You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence "democracy", and the other "tyranny".”
— Karl Popper
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“There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.”
— Michel de Montaigne
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"Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power."
- Chelsea Manning
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“It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
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"The real journey of life is interior."
- Thomas Merton
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"False information. Chaos. Oligarchical rule. Welcome to the new reality."
- Dave Pell
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"Life is like a box of chocolates — increasingly expensive."
- Sherwood News
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"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers."
- Carl Sagan
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“I have learned that in any significant or continuing relationship, feelings which are persistent had best be expressed. If they are expressed as feelings owned by me, the result may be temporarily upsetting but ultimately far more rewarding than any attempt to deny or conceal them.”
— Carl Rogers
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“There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word "happy" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
— Carl Jung
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“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
— Abraham Maslow
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“If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays. I can now add a slight variation on this; you cannot have a good society unless virtue pays.”
— Abraham Maslow
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“The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.”
— Wendell Berry
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"One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, that is enough for me."
- Louis Pasteur
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“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”
— James Baldwin
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“One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
— James Baldwin
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"I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art."
- Carrie Fisher
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"An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc."
- Henri Matisse
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“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
— Zadie Smith
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