conscience quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

Anne Frank: 

Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.

Carl Jung: 

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, 'Something is out of tune.'

Christopher Reeve: 

I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Erich Fromm: 

The paradoxical -- and tragic -- situation of man is that his conscience is weakest when he needs it most.

H. L. Mencken: 

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Hannah Arendt: 

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC: 

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Izaak Walton: 

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

James Freeman Clarke: 

Conscience is the root of all true courage; if a man would be brave let him obey his conscience.

John Calvin: 

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul. 

Joseph Cook: 

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

Kenneth Kaunda: 

The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is the great force leading to change.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: 

While conscience is our friend, all is at peace; however once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind.

Lillian Hellman: 

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group. [Letter to the US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, 1952]

Mark Twain: 

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Martin Niemöller: 

First they came for the Jews. I was silent. I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists. I was silent. I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists. I was silent. I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me. There was no one left to speak for me.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

The Roots of Violence: 
Wealth without work, 
Pleasure without conscience, 
Knowledge without character, 
Commerce without morality, 
Science without humanity, 
Worship without sacrifice, 
Politics without principles.

Origen: 

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Robert G. Ingersoll: 

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Robert Redford: 

Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.

Theodore Parker: 

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.

Thomas Paine: 

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

William Ellery Channing: 

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

connections quotes

Albert Camus: 

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

Albert Einstein: 

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Alfred Tennyson: 

I am a part of all that I have met.

Anais Nin: 

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Ben Sweetland: 

We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.

Black Elk: 

Hear me, four quarters of the world - a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds. 
(1863-1950) Oglala Sioux holy man 


Blaise Pascal: 

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

Charlie Daniels: 

A brief candle; both ends burning 
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning 
A friend to share the lonesome times 
A handshake and a sip of wine 
So say it loud and let it ring 
We are all a part of everything 
The future, present and the past 
Fly on proud bird 
You're free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.


Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 

It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.

David Bohm: 

Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.

E.M. Forster: 

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

Felix Adler: 

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.
An Ethical Philosophy of Life


Frederick Buechner: 

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Harriet Goldhor Lerner: 

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

Herman Melville: 

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

John Muir: 

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

John Muir: 

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

Kahlil Gibran: 

... joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Margaret Fuller: 

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

Marianne Williamson: 

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Mark Twain: 

Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Murray Gell-Mann: 

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Peter Senge: 

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." It is a set of general principles -- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management.... During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility -- for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.

Rabindranath Tagore: 

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment. 
from Gitanjali


Sandra Day O'Connor: 

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.

Serge Kahili King: 

We are all connected to everyone and everything in the universe. Therefore, everything one does as an individual affects the whole. All thoughts, words, images, prayers, blessings, and deeds are listened to by all that is.

Ursula K. LeGuin: 

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

William Shakespeare: 

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

confusion quotes

Alan Bennett: 

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

Barry Lopez: 

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams


Blaise Pascal: 

You always admire what you really don't understand.

Chinese proverb: 

One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.

Gilda Radner: 

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.

Henri Nouwen: 

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Jane Haddam: 

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.

Lewis Carroll: 

Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

M. Scott Peck: 

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

Marshall McLuhan: 

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools.

Molly Ivins: 

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

Rainer Maria Rilke: 

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. 
Letters to a Young Poet


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

Rumi: 

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. 
Someone sober will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.

Salvador Dali: 

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

Thomas A. Edison: 

Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.

Tom Peters: 

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.

confilict quotes

Albert Einstein: 

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Ann Landers: 

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest--never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership. 
Ann Landers Says Truth Is Stranger..., 1968


Bertrand Russell: 

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race. 
Education and the Social Order


Christopher Morley: 

There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.

Colette: 

My dear sir, they don't debate. Each of them merely issues an ultimatum, and in what a tone! It all goes to show what extraordinary people they are, each more unequivocal than the other. - "The Old Lady and the Bear"

Danny DeVito: 

There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go? 
The War of the Roses 


Dante Aleghieri: 

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.

David Friedman: 

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

David Hume: 

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Dorothy Thompson: 

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.

Elizabeth Drew: 

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall: 

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. (paraphrasing Voltaire)

Hamilton Mabie: 

Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against; not with; the wind.

Heinz Pagels: 

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts. 
The Dreams of Reason, 1988


Herbert Butterfield: 

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

Indira Gandhi: 

You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.

John Dewey: 

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.

Jonathan Kozol: 

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
On Being a Teacher, 1981


M. Scott Peck: 

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

[W]e are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another.

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach: 

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.

Mary Parker Follett: 

There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.

Meldrick Lewis: 

If you ain't never pick up the sword, you ain't never have to worry about fallin' on it.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

Non-cooperation is a measure of discipline and sacrifice, and it demands respect for the opposite views.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Robert Frost: 

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Sharon Welch: 

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Theodore Adorno: 

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Thomas Paine: 

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Walter Lippmann: 

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

William Ellery Channing: 

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

confidence quotes

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

Erik H. Erikson: 

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Henry Ford: 

If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right. also attributed to Mary Kay Ash

Marian Wright Edelman: 

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Sidonie Gruenberg: 

To value his own good opinion, a child has to feel that he is a worthwhile person. He has to have confidence in himself as an individual.

Virginia Woolf: 

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to

computers quotes

Frederick Brooks, Jr.: 

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found the last bug." (The Mythical Man Month)

Gerald Weinberg: 

If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

Jack Lynch: 

Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.

Joseph Campbell: 

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Pablo Picasso: 

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Paul Valery: 

The ultimate "computer," our own brain, uses only ten watts of power -- one-tenth the energy consumed by a hundred-watt bulb.

Robert Wilensky: 

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Unknown: 

Asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim.

Unknown: 

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Werner von Braun: 

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.

compromise quotes

Janis Joplin: 

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

Mary Parker Follett: 

There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Zelda Fitzgerald: 

Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes. 
Save Me the Waltz, 1932

compassion quotes

Abraham Joshua Heschel: 

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. [New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963]

Albert Einstein: 

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Schweitzer: 

What does Reverence for Life say abut the relations between [humanity] and the animal world? Whenever I injury any kind of life I must be quite certain that it is necessary. I must never go beyond the unavoidable, not even in apparently insignificant things. The farmer who has mowed down a thousand flowers in his meadow in order to feed his cows must be careful on his way home not to strike the head off a single flower by the side of the road in idle amusement, for he thereby infringes on the law of life without being under the pressure of necessity.

Arnold Schopenhauer: 

Compassion is the basis of morality.

Benjamin Disraeli: 

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

Bertrand Russell: 

Three passions have governed my life: 
The longings for love, the search for knowledge, 
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind]. 

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. 
In the union of love I have seen 
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision 
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined. 

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. 
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. 
I have wished to know why the stars shine. 

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, 
But always pity brought me back to earth; 
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart 
Of children in famine, of victims tortured 
And of old people left helpless. 
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, 
And I too suffer. 

This has been my life; I found it worth living. 
adapted


Edward Bulwer-Lytton: 

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

Eugene V. Debs: 

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Felix Adler: 

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.

George Washington Carver: 

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

HH the Dalai Lama: 

Compassion is the radicalism of our time.

HH the Dalai Lama: 

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

Keshavan Nair: 

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.

Mairead Maguire: 

\We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Molleen Matsumura: 

Reason guides our attempt to understand the world about us. Both reason and compassion guide our efforts to apply that knowledge ethically, to understand other people, and have ethical relationships with other people. 
2/95


Pema Chodron: 

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

Peter Singer: 

All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Sogyal Rinpoche: 

...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.

Spinoza: 

Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.

Thomas Aquinas: 

I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it.

Thomas Jefferson: 

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Thomas Merton: 

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

Vaclav Havel: 

Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

Viktor Frankl: 

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

community quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.

Alfred Tennyson: 

I am a part of all that I have met.

Black Elk: 

Hear me, four quarters of the world - a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds. 
(1863-1950) Oglala Sioux holy man 


Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Chinese proverb: 

One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.

Cicero: 

We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race.

Elie Wiesel: 

This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.

Eugene V. Debs: 

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
1908 speech


Eugene V. Debs: 

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Frederick Buechner: 

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

George Bernard Shaw: 

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

Gertrude Stein: 

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.

Groucho Marx: 

I would never belong to a group that would accept someone like me as a member.

HH the Dalai Lama: 

Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.

This entry continued ...
Harold Kushner: 

What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.

Jane Addams: 

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

John Dewey: 

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.

Lyndon B. Johnson: 

The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.

M. Scott Peck: 

There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.

Margaret Mead: 

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.

Marianne Williamson: 

In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart there is the power to do it.

Mark Morrison-Reed: 

The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen. Together, our vision widens and strength is renewed.

Mitsugi Saotome: 

If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
The Conservative


Robert McAfee Brown: 

How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

Rumi: 

Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.

Sandra Day O'Connor: 

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.

Sharon Welch: 

Resistance to oppression is often based on a love that leads us to value ourselves, and leads us to hope for more 
than the established cultural system is willing to grant ... such love is far more energizing than guilt, duty, or self-sacrifice. Love for others leads us to accept accountability (in contrast to feeling guilt) and motivates our search for ways to end our complicity with structures of oppression. Solidarity does not require self-sacrifice, but an enlargement of the self to include community with others. [The Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Sharon Welch: 

An appropriate symbol for the process of celebrating life, enduring limits, and resisting injustice ... is the beloved community.... The beloved community names the matrix within which life is celebrated, love is worshipped, and partial victories over injustice lay the groundwork for further acts of criticism and courageous defiance. From within the matrix of beloved community, there is a solid basis for social critique and self criticism: the life-giving love constitutive of solidarity with the oppressed and love of oneself. [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Simone Weil: 

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"

Starhawk: 

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.

Vaclav Havel: 

Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

Virginia Woolf: 

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

Virginia Woolf: 

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Wendell Berry: 

We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other's arms
And the larger circle of lovers,
Whose hands are joined in a dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life,
Who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it
Except in fragments

William Pickens: 

Living together is an art.
speech, meeting of Congregationalists, Oak Park, Illinois, November 2, 1932

communication quotes

Adrienne Rich: 

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Alvin Toffler: 

In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.

Ambrose Bierce: 

Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own. 
The Devil's Dictionary 


Anne Morrow Lindbergh: 

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Clarence Darrow: 

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

Edward R. Murrow: 

People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.

Edward R. Murrow: 

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

Edwin H. Friedman: 

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.

Ernest Hemingway: 

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 

Be sincere; be brief; be seated.

George Bernard Shaw: 

The problem with communication ... is the illusion that it has been accomplished.

George Eliot: 

[I]t is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Hildegard Goos-Mayr: 

Generally speaking, the first nonviolent act is not fasting, but dialogue. The other side, the adversary, is recognized as a person, he is taken out of his anonymity and exists in his own right, for what he really is, a person. To engage someone in dialogue is to recognize him, have faith in him. At every step in the nonviolent struggle, at every level we try tirelessly to establish a dialogue, or reestablish it if it has broken down. When I say 'the other side,' that could be a group of persons or a government.

Hubert H. Humphrey: 

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

John Dewey: 

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.

Jonathan Swift: 

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

Joseph Priestley: 

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

Kin Hubbard: 

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

Marcel Proust: 

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.

Margaret Chase Smith: 

One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking. I always try to think before I talk.

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach: 

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

Michel de Montaigne: 

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Pearl S. Buck: 

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

Rachel Naomi Remen: 

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Robert Greeleaf: 

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.

Robert Greenleaf: 

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.

Rollo May: 

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Rudyard Kipling: 

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Sharon Schuster: 

When we have the courage to speak out – to break our silence – we inspire the rest of the "moderates" in our communities to speak up and voice their views.

Virginia Satir: 

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

Willa Cather: 

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Woodrow Wilson: 

If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.

common sense quotes

Albert Einstein: 

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: 

Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

Henry Ward Beecher: 

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

Robert Green Ingersoll: 

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

Rudyard Kipling: 

I always try to believe the best of everybody -- it saves so much trouble.

Will Rogers: 

Common sense ain't common.

commitment quotes

Alfred Adler: 

We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.

Anne Morriss: 

The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love. (part of a quote from The Way I See It #76, Starbucks Coffee)

Carter Heyward: 

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

This entry continued ...
Edward Everett Hale: 

I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do
The something that I can do.

Eugene V. Debs: 

Solidarity is not a matter of sentiment but a fact, cold and impassive as the granite foundations of a skyscraper. If the basic elements, identity of interest, clarity of vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of results.

Francis Bacon: 

He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

High Eagle: 

In life, many thoughts are born in the course of a moment, an hour, a day. Some are dreams, some visions. Often, we are unable to distinguish between them. To some, they are the same; however, not all dreams are visions. Much energy is lost in fanciful dreams that never bear fruit. But visions are messages from the Great Spirit, each for a different purpose in life. Consequently, one person's vision may not be that of another. To have a vision, one must be prepared to receive it, and when it comes, to accept it. Thus when these inner urges become reality, only then can visions be fulfilled. The spiritual side of life knows everyone's heart and who to trust. How could a vision ever be given to someone to harbor if that person could not be trusted to carry it out. The message is simple: commitment precedes vision.

Leo Buscaglia: 

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back -- but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

Mary Kay Ash: 

Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.

Princess Diana: 

Only do what your heart tells you.

Rollo May: 

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

Stephen Covey: 

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Talmud (attributed): 

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Thomas Jefferson: 

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour. Declaration of Independence

Vince Lombardi: 

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

civilization quotes

Albert Schweitzer: 

Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

Ariel and Will Durant: 

Education is the transmission of civilization.

Barbara Tuchman: 

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Felix Adler: 

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

Henry David Thoreau: 

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

Howard Winters: 

Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term 'we' or 'us' and at the same time decreases those labeled 'you' or 'them' until that category has no one left in it.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Thomas Jefferson: 

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Vince Lombardi: 

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

cities quotes

A. J. Foyt: 

I feel safer on a racetrack than I do on Houston's freeways.

Benjamin Franklin: 

He that can take rest is greater than he that can take cities.

Brigid Brophy: 

The truth is that the city is a device for reducing stress - by giving humans a free choice of escapes from the pressure (along with the weather) of their environment.

Butch Hancock: 

Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

Dorothy Parker: 

As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

Frank Lloyd Wright: 

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

Georgia O'Keeffe: 

I said to myself -- I'll paint what I see -- what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it -- I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

Jane Jacobs: 

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems.

John F. Kennedy: 

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

Lyndon B. Johnson: 

The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

From Washington, proverbially "the city of distances," through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.

christmas quotes

Agnes M. Pharo: 

What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace.

Arlo Guthrie: 

Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, 
He must be a communist. 
And a beard and long hair, 
Must be a pacifist. 
What's in that pipe that he's smoking?
"The Pause of Mr. Claus"


Barbara Ehrenreich: 

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

Bart Simpson: 

Christmas is the one time of year when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.

Calvin Coolidge: 

Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.

Charles Dana: 

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exists, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.
editorial in the New York Sun, 1897, responding to a letter from 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon


Charles Dickens: 

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

Charles Dickens: 

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Dale Evans: 

Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.

Daniel Roselle: 

CREDO AT CHRISTMAS

At Christmas time I believe the things that children do.


I believe with English children that holly placed in windows will protect our homes from evil. 

I believe with Swiss children that the touch of edelweiss will charm a person with love. 


This entry continued ...
Dick Gregory: 

I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white man would be coming into my neighborhood after dark.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: 

When Christmas bells are swinging above the fields of snow,
We hear sweet voices ringing from lands of long ago,
And etched on vacant places
Are half-forgotten faces
Of friends we used to cherish, and loves we used to know.
"Christmas Fancies" - Poems of Power


Emily Dickinson: 

Before the ice is in the pools, 
Before the skaters go, 
Or any cheek at nightfall 
Is tarnished by the snow, 
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree, 
Wonder upon wonder 
Will arrive to me!

Erma Bombeck: 

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression


Eva K. Logue: 

A Christmas candle is a lovely thing;
It makes no noise at all,
But softly gives itself away;
While quite unselfish, it grows small.

Garrison Keillor: 

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

George Bernard Shaw: 

Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.

Grace Noll Crowell: 

Let Us Keep Christmas
Whatever else be lost among the years,
Let us keep Christmas still a shining thing;
Whatever doubts assail us, or what fears,
Let us hold close one day, remembering
It's poignant meaning for the hearts of men.
Let us get back our childlike faith again.

Hamilton Wright Mabie: 

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

Harlan Miller: 

I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month.

Helen Steiner Rice: 

Peace on earth will come to stay, 
When we live Christmas every day.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 

I heard the bells on Christmas day 
Their old familiar carols play 
And mild and sweet the words repeat, 
Of peace on earth, good will to men. 

I thought how as the day had come, 
The belfries of all Christendom 
Had roll'd along th' unbroken song 
Of peace on earth, good will to men. 

And in despair I bow'd my head: 
"There is no peace on earth," I said, 
"For hate is strong, and mocks the song 
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

This entry continued ...
Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon: 

Remember this December, that love weighs more than gold!

Kate L. Bosher: 

Isn't it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for - I don't know what exactly, but it's something that you don't mind so much not having at other times.

Katharine Whitehorn: 

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

Kin Hubbard: 

Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

Lenora Mattingly Weber: 

Christmas is for children. But it is for grownups too. Even if it is a headache, a chore, and nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chill and hide-bound hearts.

Lenore Hershey: 

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.

Oren Arnold: 

Christmas gift suggestions:
To your enemy, forgiveness. 
To an opponent, tolerance. 
To a friend, your heart. 
To a customer, service. 
To all, charity. 
To every child, a good example. 
To yourself, respect.


Ralph Sockman: 

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Shirley Temple: 

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.

Sir Walter Scott: 

Heap on the wood!-the wind is chill; 
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still.

W. C. Fields: 

Christmas at my house is always at least six or seven times more pleasant than anywhere else. We start drinking early. And while everyone else is seeing only one Santa Claus, we'll be seeing six or seven.

W. C. Jones: 

The joy of brightening other lives, bearing each others' burdens, easing other's loads and supplanting empty hearts and lives with generous gifts becomes for us the magic of Christmas.

Washington Irving: 

Christmas! 'Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial fire of charity in the heart.

christianity quotes

A. W. Tozer: 

Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity.

Abraham Lincoln: 

That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.

Aggie Pate: 

I didn't know Onward Christian Soldiers was a Christian song. 
at a non-denominational mayor's breakfast, Fort Worth, Texas


Alexis deTocqueville: 

Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts - the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.

Ambrose Bierce: 

Christian: One who thinks the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

Benjamin Franklin: 

The moral and religious system which Jesus Christ transmitted to us is the best the world has ever seen, or can see.

C. I. Scofield: 

The church has failed to follow her appointed pathway of separation, holiness, heavenliness and testimony to an absent but coming Christ; she has turned aside from that purpose to the work of civilizing the world, building magnificent temples, and acquiring earthly power and wealth, and, in this way, has ceased to follow in the footsteps of Him who had not where to lay His head.

C. S. Lewis: 

If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

C. S. Lewis: 

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

C. S. Lewis: 

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.

C.S. Lewis: 

Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.

Dan Quayle: 

... I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.

Darkmist42: 

Throughout most of the history of the Christian religion books were quite scarce -- prohibitively expensive and time consuming to make.... When one considers this, it seems absurd that the Christian religion somehow is founded on the idea that Bibles were to function as some kind of instruction manual to be kept, studied, and followed to the letter by all true believers. 
AOL Member 


David Barton: 

Whatever is Christian is legal; whatever is not is illegal. 
president of Wallbuilders, Inc. quoting William Penn's 1681 PA constitution 


Dean Stanley: 

The true call of a Christian is not to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things in an extraordinary way.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 

Politics are not the task of a Christian.

Edward R. Murrow: 

If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

Francois Arouet: 

What a terrible time this is to be a Christian. The churches have failed and betrayed us, and the ministry preaches hate and murder. If there is a sane and reasoning voice in the Christian church today it is sadly silent. 
Kauai Times editorial


Frederick Douglass: 

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!

Friedrich Nietzsche: 

A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the sense, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.

G. K. Chesterton: 

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Gary Wills: 

Jesus as a person does not exist outside the gospels. The only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith.

Harry Emerson Fosdick (attributed): 

Someone has said, "If we could get religion like a Baptist, experience it like a Methodist, be positive about it like a Disciple, be proud of it like an Episcopalian, pay for it like a Presbyterian, propagate it like an Adventist, and enjoy it like an Afro-American -- that would be some religion!"

Henry Fielding: 

Nor is religion manifold, because there are various sects and heresies in the world. When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion, and not only the Protestant religion but the Church of England. 

Isaac Asimov: 

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

James Madison: 

Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects? 
Memorial and Remonstrance


James Russell Lowell: 

We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.

Joan B. Campbell: 

[Jesus'] ministry was clearly defined, and the alternatives to the illusion and temptations of the desert were spelled out. A choice was made -- life abundant, full, and free for all. Make no mistake about it, the day that choice was made, Jesus became suspect. That day in the temple he sealed the fate already prepared for him. How was the world to understand one who rejected an offer of power and control? 
Sojourners, August-September, 1991


John Calvin: 

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.

John Calvin: 

Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?

John Wesley: 

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.

Kathleen Norris: 

Perfection, in a Christian sense, means becoming mature enough to give ourselves to others.

Leo Tolstoy: 

Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the State, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment, its wars.

Ma Ferguson: 

If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me! 
Governor of Texas (circa 1920) 


Madeleine L'Engle: 

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, "Let all children come unto me."

Minna Canth: 

Christianity has been buried inside the walls of churches and secured with the shackles of dogmatism. Let it be liberated to come into the midst of us and teach us freedom, equality and love.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

Otto von Bismarck: 

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

Pearl S. Buck: 

We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.

Randall Terry: 

I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good ... if a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country... former leader of Operation Rescue

Salman Rushdie: 

Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Tonia Jauch: 

In our work of challenging them, we need to keep several factors in mind. First of all, we must not lump all Christians in with the RRR. The majority of main-line Christians are as appalled at their tactics as we are. Nor, as we have seen, dare we stick all Evangelicals into one category either. And among the self-identified RRR themselves, there is not theological agreement, so we need to avoid guilt-by-association. 
  Secondly, we need to be vigilant not to project our own shadow side onto them and demonize them, seeing them as the enemy. We must avoid being condescending or patronizing. I see them as extremely fearful people, desperately searching for security in a rapidly-changing world, who need our love and compassion, while we, at the same time, effectively interrupt their tactics. 
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Southern California Unit Board 


Unknown: 

"Top Ten List: Why Elvis Will Replace Jesus" 
(a classic Net humor piece)

choice/choosing quotes

André Gide: 

The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions.

Barbara De Angelis: 

Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.

Barry Lopez: 

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams


C. Wright Mills: 

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.

Carl Rogers: 

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

Carl Sandburg: 

Choose
The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

Carter Heyward: 

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

This entry continued ...
Ecclesiastes: 

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8


Elaine Maxwell: 

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: 

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

Elizabeth Dole: 

What you always do before you make a decision is consult. The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: 

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

This entry continued ...
Gerda Lerner: 

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

Ingrid Bergman: 

You must train your intuition -- you must trust the small voice inside you which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide.

John Kenneth Galbraith: 

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Kenneth Patton (adapted): 

By the choices and acts of our lives, we create the person that we are and the faces that we wear. By the choices and acts of our lives we give to the world wherein our lives are lived, hoping that our neighbors will find our contributions to be of worth, and hoping that the world will be a little more gracious for our time in it.

Leo Buscaglia: 

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Mae West: 

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

Margaret Sanger: 

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.

Origen: 

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

Rachel Carson: 

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Rene Descartes: 

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Simone Weil: 

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

Theodore Bikel: 

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

Viktor Frankl: 

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

W. H. Auden: 

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith.

Choice/Choosing Quotes

André Gide: 

The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions.

Barbara De Angelis: 

Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.

Barry Lopez: 

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams


C. Wright Mills: 

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.

Carl Rogers: 

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

Carl Sandburg: 

Choose
The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

Carter Heyward: 

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

This entry continued ...
Ecclesiastes: 

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8


Elaine Maxwell: 

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: 

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

Elizabeth Dole: 

What you always do before you make a decision is consult. The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: 

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

This entry continued ...
Gerda Lerner: 

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

Ingrid Bergman: 

You must train your intuition -- you must trust the small voice inside you which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide.

John Kenneth Galbraith: 

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Kenneth Patton (adapted): 

By the choices and acts of our lives, we create the person that we are and the faces that we wear. By the choices and acts of our lives we give to the world wherein our lives are lived, hoping that our neighbors will find our contributions to be of worth, and hoping that the world will be a little more gracious for our time in it.

Leo Buscaglia: 

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Mae West: 

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

Margaret Sanger: 

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.

Origen: 

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

Rachel Carson: 

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Rene Descartes: 

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Simone Weil: 

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

Theodore Bikel: 

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

Viktor Frankl: 

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

W. H. Auden: 

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith.

children quotes

African proverb: 

It takes a village to raise a child.

Ambrose Bierce: 

Childhood: The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth -- two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Anna Quindlen: 

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

Anne Frank: 

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Annie Sullivan: 

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Bill Cosby: 

Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.

Bill Vaughn: 

A three-year-old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.

Bureau of Social Hygiene study, 1928: 

It is very difficult and expensive to undo after you are married the things that your mother and father did to you while you were putting your first six birthdays behind you.

Chinese proverb: 

One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.

Clarence Darrow: 

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.

Colette: 

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

Dorothy Parker: 

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.

Eda LeShan: 

Becoming responsible adults is no longer a matter of whether children hang up there pajamas or put dirty towels in the hamper, but whether they care about themselves and others -- and whether they see everyday chores as related to how we treat this planet.

Elizabeth Stone: 

Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

Ellen Galinsky: 

Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents-to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.

Erma Bombeck: 

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression


Florida Scott-Maxwell: 

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Franklin P. Jones: 

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

Garrison Keillor: 

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.

George Bernard Shaw: 

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

George W. Bush: 

I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.

George Washington Carver: 

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

Golda Meir: 

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.

Groucho Marx: 

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

Harry S Truman: 

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Herbert Hoover: 

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hodding Carter: 

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: 

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.

James Baldwin: 

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

James Baldwin: 

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Jane Nelson: 

Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?

Jill Bensley: 

The most effective form of birth control I know is spending the day with my kids.

John Adams: 

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John J. Plomp: 

You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: 

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.

Kahlil Gibran: 

Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

Koran: 

Wealth and children are the adornment of life.

Leo Rosten: 

You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them -- no matter how old or impressive they may be -- as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much -- we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

Louis Pasteur: 

When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.

Lydia Maria Child: 

Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!

Marian Wright Edelman: 

If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction?

Marilyn French: 

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Mark Twain: 

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething.

Mark Twain - attributed in error: 

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Maureen Hawkins: 

Before you were conceived I wanted you
Before you were born I loved you
Before you were here an hour I would die for you
This is the miracle of life.

Michael Levine: 

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

P. J. O'Rourke: 

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.

Pablo Picasso: 

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pamela Glenconner: 

Bitter are the tears of a child: Sweeten them.
Deep are the thoughts of a child: Quiet them.
Sharp is the grief of a child: Take it from him.
Soft is the heart of a child: Do not harden it.

Pearl S. Buck: 

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Rabbinical saying: 

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rachel Carson: 

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Rachel Carson: 

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

Roger Lewin: 

Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn: 

The golf links lie so near the mill
  That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
  And see the men at play.
  [from "Through the Needle's Eye," 1916]

Sidonie Gruenberg: 

Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.

Sidonie Gruenberg: 

To value his own good opinion, a child has to feel that he is a worthwhile person. He has to have confidence in himself as an individual.

St. Francis Xavier: 

Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterward.

Theodore Hesburgh: 

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Thich Nhat Hanh: 

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

Thomas Moore: 

Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.

Unknown: 

- from the Institute for Stork Research and Science
Two different theories exist concerning the origin of children: the theory of Sexual reproduction, and the theory of the stork. Many people believe in the theory of sexual reproduction because they have been taught this theory at school. In reality, however, many of the world's leading scientists are in favor of the theory of the stork. If the theory of sexual reproduction is taught in schools, it must only be taught as a theory and not as the truth. Alternative theories, such as the theory of the stork, must also be taught.

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Unknown: 

Some children's answers to church school questions - from the Church of England:

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Victoria Wagner: 

A young child is, indeed, a true scientist, just one big question mark. What? Why? How? I never cease to marvel at the recurring miracle of growth, to be fascinated by the mystery and wonder of this brave enthusiasm.

William Shakespeare: 

It is a wise father that knows his own child.