Lost Cause Quotes

“When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Nobody is a lost cause. They just think they are, so they don't even bother to try sometimes.”
― Anna Todd, After We Fell

“In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.”
― Pauli Murray

“You're damaged beyond repair that even if I wanted to fix you I couldn't.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“I may be a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn't matter.”
― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“Though I knew so far as Anarchism was concerned I was backing a lost cause, it didn't seem to matter as every other cause had won at some time but that of the people themselves. At least it threw so a light on any other political persuasion.”
― Albert Meltzer, I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels

“I don't think what you want will help you. But I do appreciate a good lost cause.”
― Stephanie Garber, Once Upon a Broken Heart

“There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“A lacerare e lacerarsi ci vuole un attimo.
La pelle tira, leggermente arrossata dai cerotti. Mi accarezzo e affiora un sorriso. Calore. Pace interna o una cosa simile. Mettere le cose al proprio posto. Le ferite che cicatrizzano sotto bendaggi maldestri tradiscono sempre. E allora, non guardatemi, vi prego non guardatemi, vi scongiuro non guardatemi.
Non sono cose adatte a chi può respirare forte in un giorno di sole.”
― Valentina Di Martino

“I knew Sophie would hire you because she is one of the few people in here who believes in lost causes."
"Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel special, huh?"
"Is that what you want? For me to make you feel special?"
"I want not to feel annoyed by you," she said sharply.”
― Zøe Haslie, Just For A While

“There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”
― T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern

“Aren't lost causes sometimes the best causes, Elfangor?”
― Katherine Applegate, The Andalite Chronicles

“Favole.
Io gioco di favole.
Gioco di favole per sempre
E Sacra mento,
con corone di spine e
scettri serpenti.
In un mondo incantato,
gioco di favole e non piango.
Fa' che i nostri corpi stritolino la tristezza una volta per tutte.
E ora è così dolce, ora. Così freddo.”
― Valentina Di Martino

“All'inizio era lividi. Poi graffi. Mi calmano un momento. Righe rosse precise, a volte lettere a comporre parole, bellissime parole a comporre frasi, prese da dove. Graffi, segni delle lacrime che di segni non ne lasciano mai. All'inizio erano graffi, portavano via piccole porzioni di pelle e sporcizia. Andavano facilmente via. Con l’unghia. Poi un giorno ricordo com'era bello lasciarsi medicare. Com'era facile sentirsi consolata, una goccia di disinfettante per bambini, verde che non brucia. A lacerare e lacerarsi ci vuole un attimo.”
― Valentina Dazed Di Martino, Lost Cause

“In the United States the continued influence of the old elite meant that southern politics fell under the domination of a Democratic Party that gloried the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, and resistance to Reconstruction. White supremacy was made into the fundamental cause of the South, and racism became the tool to enforce white unity behind the Democratic Party whenever a political challenge arose. Another tactic used over and over again to maintain the Solid South was to warn against outside threats and outside agitators. The mentality of a defensive, isolated, but gallant South helped Democratic leaders to deflect attention from the problems of their society and the effects of their rule.

These powerful social currents, aided by women’s groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, shaped and inhibited the region’s culture. Conformity to white supremacy, segregation, and Democratic Party rule was a social imperative for generations of southerners who were indoctrinated in the belief that they had suffered grave injustice with the defeat of their glorious Lost Cause. Had the diverse political leaders of so-called Radical Reconstruction continued to exercise some power or influence, the South would have been a very different society [187].”
― Paul D. Escott, Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States

“I’m sorry to say this, but the city is lost. Go home to your families, while you still can. They need you, now, more than ever.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“Blue and Gray veterans led the way in focusing public attention on the minute details of each battle, a move that tended to distract attention from larger questions of meaning. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and thus pride in knowing where and when General Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not in knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Netherton was looking at the oversized bronze head of a bearded man, its neck having been crudely severed from whatever figure it must once have topped. “Lee,” said Fearing, noting the direction of Netherton’s gaze. “Robert E.” The name meaning nothing to Netherton.”
― William Gibson, Agency

“Aspire to expire for a cause uncausable.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“In the game of progress, know when to fold. Persistence is admirable, but not when it’s in the service of a lost cause. Don’t let yesterday’s efforts imprison today’s potential. Each step forward in a failed venture is not progress; it's persistence in the wrong direction.”
― Carson Anekeya

“Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas as well as to suppress blacks. In his definitive study of disenfranchisement, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, J. Morgan Kousser quotes North Carolina Governor Charles B. Aycock, who made the point succinctly, writing several years after a violent 1898 Democratic putsch ousted the interracial Populist-Republican-Fusion government that had won consecutive statewide elections: "The Democratic party is alone sufficient. We need a united people. We need the combined effort of every North Carolinian. We need the strength which comes from believing alike." Segregation was enforced on whites as well as blacks.

That reality is obscured in a contemporary perspective that flattens out history and context into a simple polarity of racism/anti-racism and reduces politics to an unchanging contest of black and white. That perspective compresses historical distinctions between slavery and Jim Crow and ignores the generation of struggle, often enough biracial or interracial, against ruling class power over defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South, as well as ongoing struggle against and within the new order as it consolidated.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Nazmahal 2, Sonnet of Lost Love

You know who the biggest enemy
of the lover is? It's the behaviorist.
The behaviorist warns, but the lover
wants to believe - the behaviorist
restrains, but the lover wants to fall.

So far, every time the behaviorist
has had the final word - I told you so -
yet the lover never learns the lesson.
Still at the faintest possibility of love,
lover jumps in, lock, stock and barrel.

Love misplaced is not love wasted,
Love misplaced is heart sweetened.
Trust misplaced is not trust lost,
Trust misplaced is humanity tested.

Every good deed is a test of heart,
Every act of love is existence tried.
It's okay to be disappointed in deception,
but never let it turn your ideals into a lie.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood