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Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.    By Leo Tolstoy    [fullquote]

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Opportunities to rise are not a substitute for a large measure of practical equality of income and social condition. The existence of such opportunitiesÂ…depends not only upon an open road but upon an equal start.    By RH Tawney    [fullquote]

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I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.    By Che Guevara    [fullquote]

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Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.    By Pierre-Simon Laplace    [fullquote]

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Before I traveled my road I was my road.    By Antonio Porchia    [fullquote]

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Before the law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted any- thing." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly, later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his years long contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.    By Franz Kafka    [fullquote]

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Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.    By Albert Einstein    [fullquote]

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A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea inside us.    By Franz Kafka    [fullquote]

241 Quotations

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When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.    By C.L.R. James    [fullquote]

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You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.    By Unknown    [fullquote]

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The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,/ Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,/ Chief nourisher in life's feast./    By William Shakespeare    [fullquote]

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Only the good die young.    By Billy Joel    [fullquote]

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Public opinion, when we made it home, was dramatically against us. The editorial boards of the major papers spoke in unison that we were an embarrassment. We were un-American. We disgraced the country my father was shot at for fighting for. But no major media gave us the opportunity to speak our minds and articulate why it was exactly that we did what we did. Everything was framed by what they wanted people to think about us. It was about as objective and unbiased as a press release from the Pentagon. It wasn't just our voices that you never heard. You also didn't get an inkling of the support we had throughout the grass roots in America that said they understood. When I say grass roots, to be perfectly clear, that means black, white, and brown folks who politically were down with what we were trying to express. Someone having black skin in no way meant they appreciated what we had done. I had certain people tell me we had set black folks back a hundred years. In other words, John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists rivaled the defeat of Reconstruction in the South and the birth of Jim Crow. It boggles the mind.    By John Carlos    [fullquote]

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There is a sweetness in the spirit of God.    By John Carlos    [fullquote]

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I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charlie.    By Marlon Brando    [fullquote]

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Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven.    By William Wordsworth    [fullquote]

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And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken.    By John Steinbeck    [fullquote]

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There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots.    By E. Hamilton Lee    [fullquote]

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God is a Concept, By Which, We Measure, Our Pain.    By John Lennon    [fullquote]

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.    By Albert Einstein    [fullquote]

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So far from God, so close to the United States.    By Porfirio Diaz    [fullquote]

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What you do is not what you think you do.    By Antonio Porchia    [fullquote]

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I died for beauty, but was scarce/Adjusted in the tomb/When one who died for truth was lain/In an adjoining room.    By Emily Dickinson    [fullquote]

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Life is fragile.    By Steve Jobs    [fullquote]

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Hess looked out at the near-empty investigations room - it was almost seven o'clock - and wondered about the behavior of his own species. He was done being shocked by it at twenty-two. He was finished being disgusted by it at thirty. It was too grim and hopeless to be amusing, and too amusing to be grim and hopeless. It made him want to be somewhere people didn't murder and gut one another for thrills, where you didn't carry around a sign for your neighbor's nuts on a platter, where people had other things to do beside standing around taking pictures of each other. Hess had spent too many of his sixty-seven years contemplating the grimace of his race, and he knew it. You could end up just like it. That was why when he made love to a woman, he always made it last as long as he could because when he was doing that he wasn't quite himself anymore, he was just a little better, a notch above the bullshit, temporarily upgraded.    By T. Jefferson Parker    [fullquote]

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This land is your land, this land is my land.    By Woody Guthrie    [fullquote]

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The right thing happens to the happy man.    By Theodore Roethke    [fullquote]

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It is true that we cannot be free from sin, but at least let our sins not be always the same.    By St Teresa Of Avila    [fullquote]

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