Quotes About Struggle

Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. "They are just what we would be in their situation

We shall lie down," Lincoln warned, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State." Lincoln

The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's, Is — not to fancy what were fair in life Provided it could be — but, finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair & the word fair can be taken in both senses — it means both beautiful and just.

Still, let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.

In June 1793 sixty of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the British attacked from the south and west; the country was helpless and bankrupt. Fourteen months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been expelled, the French armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on twenty years of almost unbroken and effortless military triumph.

If their way was a blind alley, let us not deny them the longing for liberty and justice which moved them.

En estas circunstancias, la democracia era más bien un mecanismo para formalizar las divisiones entre grupos irreconciliables.

La repugnancia a hacer la guerra no debe confundirse con la negativa a luchar

The periodic famines, the burden of labour which made men old at forty and women at thirty, were acts of God; they only became acts for which men were held responsible in times of abnormal hardship or revolution.

We feel free when we escape, even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.

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.

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors. They want to retaliate.

If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world."3

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

Some people are born to spend their lives catching up; and they are as a rule the passionate ones.

Man was nature's mistake—she neglected to finish him—and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

The most incurably frustrated—and, therefore, the most vehement—among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worth-while, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion.

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.

If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.

Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.