These quotes are not meant to be a nice and neat little summary of life in general, but rather to provoke thought on how you live your own life.

Maya Angelou

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.

Susan B. Anthony

How can you not be all on fire? ... I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don't wake up --and raise your voice in protest against the impending crime of this nation upon the new islands it has clutched from other folks. Do come into the living present and work to save us from any more barbaric male governments.

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

Anonymous

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Roy Batty, Blade Runner

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time.
Like tears in rain.
Time to die.

Saul Bellow

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

William Blake, Songs of Experience

Little fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes

If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.

Albert Camus

No man is innocent and no man may therefore judge others from a standpoint of righteousness.

Roald Dahl, The BFG

Redunculous! If everyone is making whizzpoppers, then why not talk about it?

Roald Dahl, The BFG

The matter with human beans is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.

Thomas Dewar

Minds are like parachutes--they only function when open.

Max Ehrmann, author of Desiderata

At DePauw I contracted a disease which I have never shaken off. The disease was idealism. Because of it I did the thing in life I wanted to do--writing.

Albert Einstein

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Anne Frank

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.

(I first saw this quotation at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in a display devoted to Anne Frank's life. I couldn't help but cry when it hit me that this little girl hadn't given up hope in her fellow humans, even after all they'd done to her.)

Mahatma Gandhi

Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

We have to make truth and nonviolence not matters for mere individual practice but for practice for groups and communities and nations. That at any rate is my dream. I shall live and die trying to realize it.

Kahlil Gibran, The New Frontier

Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a Zealous one asking what you can do for your country?

Elaine Gill

If you have any doubts that we live in a society controlled by men, try reading down the index of contributors to a volume of quotations, looking for women's names.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

Goethe

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

Carl Hiaasen, Sick Puppy

Son, I can't tell you what to do with your life -- hell, you've seen what I've done with mine. But I will tell you there's probably no peace for people like you and me in this world. Somebody's got to be angry or nothing gets fixed. That's what we were put here for, to stay pissed off.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Molly Ivins

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols. Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for.

Nothing like a lot of distracting saber-rattling to get you to take your eyes off the shell with the pea under it.

The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood.

Mother (Mary) Jones

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

John Keating, Dead Poet's Society

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless -- of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here -- that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's one of the strangest things that all great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon were akin in seeking a peaceful world order...One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

An individual has not started living until he or she can rise above the narrow confines of his or her individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression, they only serve to give their oppressors convenient justification for their acts. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever, the yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed. To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system.

C.W. Leadbeater

It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.

C.S. Lewis

We read to know we are not alone.

Abraham Lincoln

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

James Madison

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Margaret Mead

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Mother Teresa

We realize that what we are accomplishing is a drop in the ocean. But if this drop were not in the ocean, it would be missed.

Martin Niemoeller

In Germany they came first for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our "hump"--that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable--that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars -- yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.

Theodore Roosevelt

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

John Ruskin

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become of it.

Saint Catherine of Siena

Every evil, harm, and suffering in this life or in the next comes from the love of riches.

Mary Schmich

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

There was so much suffering in Africa that it was tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away. But you can't do that, she thought. You just can't.

Lucy Stone

In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen that disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Howard Thurman

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Leo Tolstoy

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Mark Twain

The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal.

Voltaire (or at least attributed to him)

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed from one another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.

Alice Walker

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

There is no world I know that can compare with pure imagination.

Virginia Woolf

As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the world.