Quotes to inspire and reflect

If you have learned anything at all from us [wild geese], Tummetott, you no longer think that the humans should have the whole earth to themselves.

You were singing? I’m very glad, very well, start dancing now.

The common people have scarcely any culture, the great have no soul. . . . Were I to choose between the two, I should select, without hesitation, being a plebeian.

Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.

In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

We’ve had some very caustic writings

[Richard Nixon] would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.

[ Remark after the invasion of Cambodia, 1970 :] We are all the President’s men.

Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.

A conventional army loses if it does not win.

we have not the time to meet you.

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

The Cat That Walked by Himself.

The Law of the Jungle.

When you get to a man in the case,

An’ for all ’is dirty ’ide

Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,

We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,

We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart;

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep

There will never be any more great men in India. They will all, when they are boys, go whoring after strange gods.

Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world.

[ Suggesting his own eulogy :] Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir . . . America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, and when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children, that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, and not the color of their skin.

We can never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.”

I have a dream tonight. One day my little daughter and my two sons will grow up in a world not conscious of the color of their skin but only conscious of the fact that they are members of the human race.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly , . . . and with a willingness to accept the penalty.

Government action is not the whole answer to the present crisis, but it is an important partial answer. Morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.

It is historically and biologically true that there can be no birth and growth without birth and growing pains. Whenever there is the emergence of the new we confront the recalcitrance of the old. So the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world order is being born and an old order is passing away.

“The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible.” The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.

Truth Is Subjectivity.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards.

Owe your banker ₤1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him ₤1 million and the position is reversed.

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

A “sound” banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyment and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.