Chandler > Chandler's Quotes

“What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.”
― Langston Hughes, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems

“For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.”
― Tennessee Williams

“If you feel pain, you are alive. If you feel other people's pain, you are a human being.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Well-read people are less likely to be evil.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope

“Pride is not the opposite of shame, but it's source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.”
― General Iroh

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”
― Bayard Rustin

“In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.”
― J. R. R. Tolkien

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
― Maya Angelou

“A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
― Oscar Wilde

“An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”
― Plato

“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
― Sophie Scholl

“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.”
― Lao Tzu

“Despite how open, peaceful, and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you, as deeply as they've met themselves. This is the heart of clarity.”
― Matt Kahn

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Florence Nightingale was never called “the Lady with the Lamp,” but “the Lady with the Hammer,” an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed.”
― Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

“People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.”
― Edmund Burke

“To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“They say it's the 'me' generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. Social media - it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It's prison - it's horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”
― Bo Burnham

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer