Jack Pasti > Jack's Quotes

“Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.”
― Emma Goldman

“But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.”
― Emma Goldman

“If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.”
― Emma Goldman

“We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.
Such is the logic of patriotism.”
― Emma Goldman

“The words have forasken us but we continue to write because the brave souls of Gaza continue to bleed. It is as if we are part of an endless funeral procession. The grief comes in waves, it ebbs and flows but mostly it crashes onto our hearts with great force and leaves us breathless. Helpless.”
― Aysha Taryam

“I let myself cry for exactly one minute in the shower—one of six stalls in what used to be a shared space but now belonged to just me.”
― Michael Mammay, The Weight of Command

“What was it like, to be the only one who came back? The only one who still had a body to touch, to hurt, to yearn with? The last one still able to die?”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I stopped being able to feel a great many things as we killed and killed...”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin

“I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“You chose books, I chose looks . Now see the difference?”
― Roald Dahl

“Men were foolish and were made only so that they should die, while mountains and rivers went on for ever and did not notice the passing of time.”
― Roald Dahl, Katina

“In love, as in life, one misheard word can be tremendously important. If you tell someone you love them, for instance, you must be absolutely certain that they have replied "I love you back" and not "I love your back" before you continue the conversation.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”
― thomas paine, Rights of Man

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
― Thomas Paine

“The greatest remedy for anger is delay.”
― Thomas Paine

“Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course. But we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time. It is therefore at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie. ”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error - covers every defect - extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.”
― Washington Irving

“People break all the time, no lie there and when that wretched break happens something is usually lost, left behind confused or some is hurt, a member of the family, a child, pure and innocent of the cruel world, dangerous adult men and women.”
― Abigail George, All About My Mother

“I am too good at making you see what you want to see. It has been hard me whole life to make that picture seem so perfect. The perfect daughter in the perfect family who was after all not so perfect. There was again only the illusion of what outsiders wanted to see.”
― Abigail George, All About My Mother

“Why did he see other people dying on the news and yet he was still alive?”
― Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

“There is no worse sound in the world than someone who cannot play the violin but insists on doing so anyway.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy

“It is terribly rude to tell people that their troubles are boring.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”
― Stewart O'Nan, The Odds: A Love Story

“Nothing quite like seeing familiar faces in unfamiliar places.”
― Nate Damm, I Promise I Won't Kill You: A Hitchhiking Adventure

“A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Selected Works

“We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Law, being a practical thing, must found itself on actual forces. It is quite enough, therefore, for the law, that man, by an instinct which he shares with the domestic dog, and of which the seal gives a most striking example, will not allow himself to be dispossessed, either by force or fraud, of what he olds, without trying to get it back again. Philosophy may find a hundred reasons to justify the instinct, but it would be totally immaterial if it should condemn it and bid us surrender without a murmur.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law