Robert Gammon > Robert's Quotes

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  • #1
    Winston S. Churchill
    “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
    Winston S. Churchill

  • #2
    Isaac Asimov
    “The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own "national security" to be paramount above all other consideration.

    I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing "Give My Regards to Broadway."

    This sort of thing, however, should remain cultural and benign. I'm against it if it means that each group despises others and lusts to wipe them out. I'm against arming each little self-defined group with weapons with which to enforce its own prides and prejudices.

    The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike.

    Can that be done? The question is equivalent to: Can humanity survive?

    I am not a Zionist, then, because I don't believe in nations, and because Zionism merely sets up one more nation to trouble the world. It sets up one more nation to have "rights" and "demands" and "national security" and to feel it must guard itself against its neighbors.

    There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity. ”
    Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

  • #3
    United Nations
    “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
    United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

  • #4
    John Fitzgerald Kennedy
    “The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”
    John F. Kennedy

  • #5
    Larry J. Sabato
    “Every election is determined by the people who show up.”
    Larry J. Sabato , Pendulum Swing

  • #6
    Abraham Lincoln
    “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.”
    Abraham Lincoln

  • #7
    Mahatma Gandhi
    “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
    Mahatma Gandhi

  • #8
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt
    “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
    Franklin D. Roosevelt

  • #9
    George Orwell
    “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
    George Orwell, 1984

  • #10
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    “Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

  • #11
    Kahlil Gibran
    “Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.”
    Khalil Gibran

  • #12
    Mahatma Gandhi
    “Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.”
    Mahatma Gandhi

  • #13
    Eleanor Roosevelt
    “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
    Eleanor Roosevelt

  • #14
    Salman Rushdie
    “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims.

    United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for?

    The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

    How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”
    Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

  • #15
    Kofi Annan
    “Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.”
    Kofi Annan

  • #16
    Martin Luther King Jr.
    “I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”
    Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • #17
    Antonio Gramsci
    “I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.

    The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened?

    I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them.

    I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.”
    Antonio Gramsci

  • #18
    Milan Kundera
    “Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”
    Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  • #19
    Thomas Aquinas
    “Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.”
    Thomas Aquinas

  • #20
    John Stuart Mill
    “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
    John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

  • #21
    Martin Luther King Jr.
    “One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”
    Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • #22
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt
    “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  • #23
    Jane Addams
    “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
    Jane Addams

  • #24
    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.”
    Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

  • #25
    Mahatma Gandhi
    “Truth resides in every human heart,
    and one has to search for it there,
    and to be guided by truth as one sees it.
    But no one has a right to coerce others
    to act according to his own view of truth.”
    Mahatma Gandhi
    tags: truth

  • #26
    Eduardo Galeano
    “Hay criminales que proclaman tan campantes ‘la maté porque era mía’, así no más, como si fuera cosa de sentido común y justo de toda justicia y derecho de propiedad privada, que hace al hombre dueño de la mujer. Pero ninguno, ninguno, ni el más macho de los supermachos tiene la valentía de confesar ‘la maté por miedo’, porque al fin y al cabo el miedo de la mujer a la violencia del hombre es el espejo del miedo del hombre a la mujer sin miedo.”
    Eduardo Hughes Galeano

  • #27
    Adam Smith
    “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
    Adam Smith

  • #28
    Milan Kundera
    “Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”
    Milan Kundera

  • #29
    Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
    “My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.”
    Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

  • #30
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt
    “If you treat people right they will treat you right ... ninety percent of the time.”
    Franklin D. Roosevelt



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