Sandra Pomponio > Sandra's Quotes

“The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free...”
― Utah Phillips

“Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world”
― Utah Phillips

“Sing your song
Dance your dance
Tell your story
I will Listen and remember”
― Utah Phillips

“Frying-Pan Jack and I were in that camp, that's where he said to me, he'd been tramping since 1927, 'I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.' You don't have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir. He said, 'I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true that the only real life I had was the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to someone for eight hours a day, for their particular use, on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition? Fat chance!”
― Utah Phillips

“The big system can be pretty overwhelming. We know that we can’t beat them by competing with them. What we can do is build small systems where we live and work that serve our needs as we define us and not as they ‘re defined for us. The big boys in their shining armor are up there on castle walls hurling their thunderbolts. We’re the ants patiently carrying sand a grain at a time from under the castle wall. We work from the bottom up. The knights up there don’t see the ants and don’t know what we’re doing. They’ll figure it out only when the wall begins to fall. It takes time and quiet persistence. Always remember this: They fight with money and we resist with time, and they’re going to run out of money before we run out of time”
― Utah Phillips

“But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read.”
― Utah Phillips

“I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can't live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know,
and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now.
I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it it would get them serious trouble. No, that 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s stuff, that whole idea of decade packaging, things don't happen that way. The Vietnam War heated up in 1965 and ended in 1975-- what's that got to do with decades? No, that packaging of time is a journalist convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that.”
― Utah Phillips

“Oh no. Don't smile. You'll kill me. I stop breathing when you smile.”
― Tessa Dare, A Lady of Persuasion

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
― Albert Einstein

“Never memorize something that you can look up.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
― Laurence J. Peter

“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
― Albert Einstein

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
― Albert Einstein

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
― Albert Einstein

“If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut”
― Albert Einstein

“What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.”
― Albert Einstein

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters”
― Albert Einstein

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”
― Albert Einstein

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein

“Out of clutter, find simplicity.”
― Albert Einstein

“We all know that light travels faster than sound. That's why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak.”
― Albert Einstein

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work...”
― Albert Einstein

“However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.”
― Albert Einstein

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
― Albert Einstein

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
― Albert Einstein