Quotes About Struggle

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory. —Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 1952

DURING THE WAR, nearly one in five slaves in the United States left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty.

Of the more than two hundred black churches and homes that had been bombed in the South since 1948, more bombs had gone off in Birmingham than in any other city.

In Norfolk, Virginia, four thousand slaves—who, living in a border state that was not part of the Confederacy, were not actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—

Masculine systems."77 That women were left out of the nation's founding documents, and out of its founders' idea of civil society, considered, like slaves, to be confined to a state of nature, would trouble the political order for centuries.

mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

the worst culprits were the ones who were secretly battling with their own feelings.

Maybe one day it would happen. Maybe one day her life would start going according to plan instead of spluttering and stalling like some clapped-out old banger.

On the outside she might appear cool, but inside her heart felt as though it was disintegrating like a digestive dropped in hot tea

When I reached this policeman in the street, he hit me over the head with his club...I wanted to get protection, but instead the cops hit me...I was afraid to run, because I knew if I did they would hit me again. Harry Reed's affidavit is dated August 22, 1900. And little has changed in a century.

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, someone will hand you a shovel.

I'd tell him to go to hell, but it just so happens I'm stuck there and don't want to have to see him every day.

For some unknown reason, success usually occurs in private, while failure occurs in full view.

I am writing this because they cannot.

There are so many of us out there, trying to turn Spyrograph flowers into rocket ships.

hoping some would-be robber or rapist or killer would find her and do her the favor of ending what she herself could not. But nothing bad had ever happened.

He thought of Hilary's tantrums, of her vacuum-cleaner kisses, her sharp teeth and scraping hands.

We all need the pipe dream of writing the great novel, or winning the pools, or becoming managing director and kicking all our colleagues in the teeth. The world is deep and dark and full of tigers, and we need those shimmering white castles in the air to creep into when life gets unbearable.

They put chains on me they chained my waist, my legs. Put me in the back of a squad car, and I literally blacked out. I didn't even - there's whole pieces missing.

School prepares you for the real world... which also bites.

She meditated upon a lie. This is the essence of temptation.

A believer who has been giving in to the pull of his sinful heart never learns the extent of its power over him until he begins to do right. It is very much like the experience of one who is rowing a canoe. As long as he is going with the current, he has no idea how strong the current really is. Only when he decides to turn his canoe around and start rowing against the current does he experience its true strength.

despair is the inevitable hopelessness of life without light.

Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn't coming back?