Maure Briggs > Maure's Quotes

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“We'll never surrender, we'll win or die
you've to fight the next generation and the next .....
and I'll live more than my hanger”
― Omar mukhtar

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield”
― William Butler Yeats

“The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
― Vladimir Ilich Lenin

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“I'm completely in favor of the
separation of Church and State.
... These two institutions screw us up enough
on their own, so both of them together is
certain death.”
― George Carlin

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
― Seneca

“I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.”
― George Carlin

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate.”
― George Carlin

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”
― Émile Zola

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”
― Charles Bukowski

“I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle.”
― Helen Keller, How I became a Socialist?: Helen Keller's Articles

“Even notoriety may be turned to beneficent uses, and I rejoice if the disposition of the newspapers to record my activities results in bringing more often into their columns the word Socialism.”
― Helen Keller, How I became a Socialist?: Helen Keller's Articles

“First — How did I become a Socialist? By reading.”
― Helen Keller, How I became a Socialist?: Helen Keller's Articles

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
― Mark Twain

“But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.”
― Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism

“We must draw up a plan for the formation of such a corps with several million people taking up the study of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the theoretical basis of Marxism, and combating all shades of idealism and mechanical materialism. At present there are many cadres doing theoretical work, but there is still no corps of theoretical workers, much less a powerful one. Without such a corps, the cause of the entire Party, the socialist industrialization and socialist transformation of our country, the modernization of our national defence and our research in atomic energy cannot move along or succeed. I therefore recommend that you comrades read philosophy.”
― Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Volume V

“The point is that Marxism and Anarchism are built up on entirely different principles, in spite of the fact that both come into the arena of the struggle under the flag of Socialism. The cornerstone of Anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the masses, the collective body. According to the tenets of Anarchism, the emancipation of the masses is impossible until the individual is emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: 'Everything for the individual.' The cornerstone of Marxism, however, is the masses, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the individual. That is to say, according to the tenets of Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible until the masses are emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: 'Everything for the masses.”
― Joseph Stalin, Anarchism or Socialism?

“One of the greatest tragedies of the world is the way it has wasted so much female potential. Half the world has been sold the idea that they should sit in the corner playing with dolls and staring in a mirror. It’s time for women to regain the status they had in pagan cultures based on the worship of the Goddess. Women are half of the equation for creating a new humanity. This time we need to get the right answer. Men and women are different. That’s not a problem: it powers the dialectic that drives us forward. The aim is to get the best of both worlds and achieve higher and higher syntheses. It’s outrageous that women have been forced to live in a male-dominated culture. In the future, it needs to be an equal partnership. Not a partnership that mindlessly treats women and men as equals when there are plainly radical differences between the two, but which assigns equal significance to their respective strengths. Yin and yang are eternal partners, not eternal enemies. Neither is more important than the other. Neither can function without the other. The dialectic needs both working at full power.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Sex for Salvation

“The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.”
― Che Guevara