Quotes About Resistance

The Freeporters were violently oppressed to social controls of all sorts. Even-especially?-healthy ones.

He could not be distracted by his darling girls when he must be about seducing villains.

Everybody seemed to think I would sell out anything, in order to gain a little physical comfort.

He feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself.

It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.

the world was a place where those who had power could do what they wanted and those without it were the victims. The world would try to make him its victim, so it was always best to strike first.

There was one pharmacist in town, a Polish man. He was a friend of my father. I risked my life to go to him for medicine. Two, three times a week, I took off my armband and went. If the Germans would have seen me they would have shot me. I told the pharmacist I couldn't pay, I had no money. He said, "Miriam, take it and go.

History produces not only the forces of domination but also the forces of resistance that press up against and are often the objects of such domination. Which is another way of saying that history, the past, is larger than the present, and is the ever-growing and ongoing possibility of resistance to the present's imposed values, the possibility of futures not unlike the present, futures that resist and transform what dominates the present.

The problematic of sexual difference entails a certain failure of knowledge to bridge the gap, the interval, between the sexes. There remains something ungraspable, something outside, unpredictable, and uncontainable, about the other sex for each sex. This irreducible difference under the best conditions evokes awe and surprise; under less favorable conditions it evinces horror, fear, struggle, resistance.

Memories represent power to people who are oppressed, for while they cannot control much of what occurs in their lives, they can own their own memories.

The day was so lovely that, to Flora, it seemed possible to leave only if it was impossible to stay. She tried to imagine leaving. She imagined that her body was asking her to leave. She

People who read Taryn's book often quoted Heine: '"Where they have burned books at the end they will burn people." That's what your book is about,' he said. 'That's where its whole argument leads.

trying to peddle its pots and pans at the door of this house.

HOW STRANGE THAT THE NATURE OF LIFE is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be. This

I have gone back to sleep in order to resist the forces of change. And I have stayed awake and been broken open. Both ways are difficult, but one way brings with it the gift of a lifetime. If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us—secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.

If all else fails, we will simply have to drug our attendants, overpower the guards, raise the oppressed peasants to arms, and take over the government.

This is the real unwritten rule: You don't want what you know you shouldn't. And I haven't just broken that rule. I have wrecked it, smashed it, and still... And still I want.

The Romans learned what European armies were to discover hundreds of years later: that the best-trained and best-equipped fighting force in the world might come to grief against partisans fighting on their own territory and for a cause for which they would willingly sacrifice themselves and their families.

A belief in Antinous' posthumous power seems to have exceeded even the formal declaration of his new status. Although there was greater resistance to the acceptance of an emperor's sexual partner as a god in the more urbane society of Rome, in the Greek east Hadrian's own philhellenism assured the new god's absorption into the Greek pantheon from the moment the emperor decided on his deification.

Hello, Olive," he said, walking to her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away. He told her the Thibodeaus were coming for supper. "It's only right," he said. Olive wiped sweat from her upper lip, turned to rip up a clump of onion grass. "Then that's that, Mr. President," she said. "Give your order to the cook.

Like many high-minded people, Wilson, when faced with opposition that he considered evil but which refused to yield to his arguments, felt no compunction about simply crossing his arms and refusing to play the game.

Churchill half expected to see German paratroopers landing on the outskirts of London. On July 12 there was a serious discussion in the War Cabinet about whether the government should encourage the populace to attack German invaders with scythes and stones.

This was why the ancient Athenians had defied the tyranny of Persia against all odds. This was why the early Romans had risked everything to overthrow their kings, so that they could live free or die. And that was why the Florentines had to be ready to die to defend their liberty, Leonardo Bruni concluded—because without liberty, "life [has] no meaning for them.

The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa.