James Smith > James's Quotes

“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. You get busy living, or get busy dying.” —Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption”
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

“If you are not free to say no, your yes is meaningless.”
― Brent Weeks, The Blinding Knife

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“But the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies—and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false;”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”
― George Carlin

“To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough”
― Andrew Collier, Marx: A Beginner's Guide

“No enemy is worse than bad advice.”
― Sophocles

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.”
― Joseph Stalin

“I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.”
― Huey P. Newton