Quotes About Sacrifice

It was thus an excellent reply that the woman made when she wanted to send a boatload of provisions to the exiled Gratilla;* for when someone said to her, 'Domitian will merely confiscate them,' she replied, 'Better that he should take them away than that I should fail to send them.

Surrender the body and its members, physical faculties, property, reputation, office, honours, children, siblings – repudiate them all.

What are you going to get when you trade your freedom away? Check to see what your proud new possessions will be worth.

and following your ideals is the only thing worth dying for.

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.

The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or "of those who are to be." We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.

The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice.

The indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization?

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for," they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause.9 Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

it takes as long as three generations of hard work, three generations of sacrifice to correct the wrong!

We all give up part of ourselves to be with anyone. Relationships change our trajectories.

Kindness never won a war. The kind filled many graves.

All I wanted was you. I tore down my wall for you. Now it's been rebuilt.

It wasn't her fault, but it was her fate, like so many single mothers, to be caught between a wistful child and his fantasies of the father who is perfect, in part because he is hardly ever there.

No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.

If I got rid of my demons, I'd lose my angels. —Tennessee Williams

For what angry God arching backward over the world. his anus spitting fire, the fetid breath of his mouth propelling blood-colored clouds, his navel full of burnt pitch and singed feathers, have we given our eyes, our teeth, our eyeglasses, bales of our our hair, and the magic of our worthless gold?

Is love freedom or is it bondage?

A good woman would have given her life to the care and feeding of her husband's madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.

When one follows the path with heart, one often bleeds. (But what is the alternative—a cauterized core?)