Terry Reavy > Terry's Quotes

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“Love is a verb, not a noun. It is active. Love is not just feelings of passion and romance. It is behavior. If a man lies to you, he is behaving badly and unlovingly toward you. He is disrespecting you and your relationship. The words “I love you” are not enough to make up for that. Don’t kid yourself that they are.”
― Susan Forward, When Your Lover Is a Liar: Healing the Wounds of Deception and Betrayal

“Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.
We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.”
― André Berthiaume

“Anyone can be polite to a stranger. Anyone can remain charming when spending time with an acquaintance, but what about those with whom we have familiarity? We hurt, offend and piss off the ones we love the most. Whenever we come home from playing nice and kissing ass instead of lips, we remove the masks and be who we really are.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“A woman in love can't be reasonable--or she probably wouldn't be in love.”
― Mae West

“If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right!”
― Mae West

“Men are my hobby, if I ever got married I'd have to give it up.”
― Mae West

“Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.”
― Mae West

“I've no time for broads who want to rule the world alone. Without men, who'd do up the zipper on the back of your dress? ”
― Mae West

“The curve is more powerful than the sword.”
― Mae West

“Getting married is like trading in the adoration of many for the sarcasm of one.”
― Mae West

“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
― Plato

“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
― Plato, The Symposium

“And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.”
― Plato, The Symposium

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

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]”
― Harry S. Truman

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
― C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The constitution shall never be construed...to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”
― Alexander Hamilton

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
― James Madison, U.S. Constitution (Saddlewire)

“[The Constitution preserves] the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
― James Madison

“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …”
― George Orwell

“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.”
― Phaedrus

“If you're going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.”
― Karin Gillespie

“Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

“If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

“If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy.”
― Fulton J. Sheen