"If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all."

Jong, Erica on autonomy
3 fans of this quote   

"We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility."

Nkrumah, Kwame on autonomy   

"The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a vanguard party, or a State bureaucracy."

Chomsky, Noam on anarchism   

"The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance."

Beecher, Henry Ward on america   

"America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick."

Abish, Walter on america
4 fans of this quote   

"I wasted time, and now time doth waste me."

Shakespeare, William on age and aging
27 fans of this quote   

"For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night."

Shakespeare, William on deception
21 fans of this quote   

"Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all."

Shakespeare, William on adversity
8 fans of this quote   

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (III.i.49–61) The Merchant of Venice"

Shakespeare, William on revenge   

"The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. [Measure For Measure]"

Shakespeare, William on fools and foolishness
22 fans of this quote   

"A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow."

Shakespeare, William on friends and friendship
38 fans of this quote   

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god -- the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!"

Shakespeare, William on humankind
4 fans of this quote   

"Own more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest."

Shakespeare, William on knowledge
7 fans of this quote   

"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport."

Shakespeare, William on death
5 fans of this quote   

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

Shakespeare, William on misers and misery   

"Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something."

Thoreau, Henry David on advice
34 fans of this quote   

"Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things."

Hamilton, Alexander on constitutions   

"Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have is this. When I have a subject in mind. I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it... the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought."

Hamilton, Alexander on genius
4 fans of this quote   

"To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt."

Bakunin, Mikhail on rebellion
5 fans of this quote   

"What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise."

Collins, Kitty O'neill on adversity
20 fans of this quote   

"In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present."

Devito, Danny on adversity
24 fans of this quote   

"The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all -- he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly."

Camus, Albert on rebellion   

"I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."

Jefferson, Thomas on rebellion
7 fans of this quote   

"There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion."

Pankhurst, Emmeline on rebellion   

"You’re required to fight the government since they are not obeying the laws of the constitution and it says in the constitution to fight them if they are not. "

Dye, James on rebellion   

"The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it -- and sometimes three."

Dumas, Alexandre on mother-in-laws
3 fans of this quote   

"To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable."

Golding, William on hell   

"Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine."

Freud, Sigmund on morality
6 fans of this quote   

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. "

Douglass, Frederick on uncategorised   

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

Engels, Friedrich on action
3 fans of this quote   

"Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal."

Engels, Friedrich on law and lawyers   

"Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on destiny
40 fans of this quote   

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on decisions
51 fans of this quote   

"So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist."

Eliot, T. S. on evil
6 fans of this quote   

"The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

Eliot, T. S. on deeds and good deeds
7 fans of this quote   

"May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

Eisenhower, Dwight D. on dissent
9 fans of this quote   

"I have not failed. I've just found 10, 000 ways that won't work."

Edison, Thomas A. on failure
27 fans of this quote   

"No man is free who is not a master of himself."

Epictetus on freedom
14 fans of this quote   

"Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen."

Epictetus on opinions
18 fans of this quote   

"Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade."

Franklin, Benjamin on genius
10 fans of this quote