Equal Opportunity Reader > Equal Opportunity's Quotes

“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
― Brennan Manning

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”
― Helder Camara, Spiral of Violence

“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”
― Terence McKenna

“One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.”
― Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language

“Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“no human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is
telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“What do they teach them at these schools?”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“Fiction is empathy technology.”
― Steven Pinker

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“These illustrations suggest four general maxims[...].
The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself.
The second is: don't over-estimate your own merits.
The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.
And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“We can’t sit around waiting for things to happen. We’ve got to make them happen. Nothing’s going to fall in our laps. That only happens to beautiful white people.”
― Don Lee

“Beasts bounding through time.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves … and other animals.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“Books have the power to create, destroy or change civilizations.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“No one should need to be big enough to destroy others and all of us must have to be powerful and resourceful enough to protect ourselves.”
― Zaman Ali, ZAMANISM Wealth of the People

“A society without democracy is a society of slaves and fools.”
― Zaman Ali, ZAMANISM Wealth of the People

“One can only describe the human but can never define it because humans are complex in their nature.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are
presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new
evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is
extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it
is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize,
ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Each thinking mind is a political mind.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House