Quotes About Struggle

Back water done rose at Sumner," sings Patton, "drove poor Charlie down, down the line.

Mississippi Heavy Water Blues

When the Levee Breaks," by Memphis Minnie. Memphis Minnie wrote this with her husband, Kansas Joe McCoy; it was later covered by Led Zepplin.

he loved about people—trouble brought out their grit, their creativity.

Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn't be coming back to, walking and talking and cutting lard into flour and slicing fish from their spines and acting as if it were an acceptable thing, this living.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great.

If you're lucky like me, your relationship with your brother has resolved itself on the peaceful side of the fence and has stayed there. But if you're someone who's got a family that's all fractured and finding it hard to relate, that's a very sad place to be.

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.

When you encounter the unbelievers, blows to necks it shall be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.

In spite of really intense competition for the job, I'm still my own worst enemy.

My films seem to be about men's struggle with failure.

Picture the poor Arab private. He knows no one in his unit gives a shit about him; after all, he doesn't give a shit about any of them, either. They're not family. What happens when that private is placed in the loneliest position in the world, the modern battlefield? He runs at the first sign things are going badly. (He'll be fine as long as they are going well, though. Note: things rarely go well.)

Dar al Islam and the Dar al Harb, the House of Submission and the House of War.

In Fourth Generation war, the state loses its monopoly on war. All over the world,

We now find ourselves facing the Christian West's oldest and most steadfast opponent, Islam.

In Fourth Generation war, the state loses its monopoly on war. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting nonstate opponents such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Almost everywhere, the state is losing.

If we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. —Theodore Roosevelt,

Ik had gedacht dat ik hem zomaar mocht opslaan in duizend lege beelden en toch vrijuit kon gaan. Maar hier en nu, in dit compartiment, in deze voortdenderende trein, schokten de duizend beelden over elkaar heen en vielen trillend samen. Hun collectieve leegte was zo smartelijk dat ik die moest vullen. Tot elke prijs. Als ik dat niet deed, zo voelde ik, zou ik ten onder gaan. Want het was een leegte die niemand kon verdragen.

Here too, as in the Commune almost a century earlier, the struggle was articulated around the hope that 'the antithesis between the everyday and the Festival--whether of labour or of leisure--will no longer be a basis for society.

But how many chose to ignore the direct attack they laid on what is fed to all of us as 'life,' with its well-defined roads to factory and pool-hall, to work and pleasure, both organized, both shells, both a continuation of existence by forced means, in the shadow of life?

You know, for a while there we kept horses for the boys, and we had a mare that had broken down. Couldn't ride it... You could feed it and brush it and water it and all. Sometimes, I've thought that's what most marriages get to. A horse you still care a little about but cannot any longer ride.

it's funny how life seems only to be able to give and take, instead of just give!