Quotations
The big Global Concerns have generated many memorable quotations (from all over the world). You will find here thought-provoking and inspiring words from many points of view about the human condition and the state of our world.
Maybe you can pick one or two of these each day or week, to stick on your wall, or write in your notebook, or carry around to inspire you ?
WANT TO SHARPEN YOUR ETHICAL 'EDGE' ?
If you can set aside the time (maybe in stages) to read through all of these quotations you will find yourself receiving an informal education in Ethics. These Quotations can help you to sharpen your ethical 'edge'. They will help you think about, clarify and strengthen your own values and principles. Included here are words from some of the wisest humanitarians who have ever lived.
These quotations can change the way you look at the world, the way you judge what's going on in the world. That can be a first step in changing things. Some of the thoughts below have inspired and sustained billions of people. Many of our users return to these Quotations again and again.
Please let us know if you have been inspired by these Quotations - and send us your own suggestions for inclusion. Send to : redlineartworks@yahoo.co.uk
THE QUOTATIONS :
"The very notion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political position." - George Orwell
“It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.” - Molière
“We are the last generation that can fight climate change. We have a duty to act” - Ban Ki-moon (former Secretary-General of the United Nations)
"The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized." - Rachel Carson, scientist, writer and activist (1907 - 1964)
“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” – Chinese Proverb
"Take your broken heart, and make it into art." - Meryl Streep, at the 2017 Golden Globes Ceremony
"What we decide to do collectively as a species politically, globally, over the next decade is going to determine the future of the next generations in terms of the habitability of the planet and what sort of environment they live in." - Jonathan Bamber, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Bristol, UK
"There is little hope of world leaders taking the action required to keep the world temperature from increasing more than 2°C, let alone 1.5°C” - Simon Pirani, Senior Research Fellow at the UK’s Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in his 2019 book : 'Burning Up, A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption', a detailed study into the burning of fossil fuels since 1950.
“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.” – Helen Keller
"All things are difficult before they are easy." - Chinese proverb
"Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today." - Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Climate Activist
"I do not want the blood of my grandchildren on my hands." - Dina Jung, 77 year-old retired teacher, UK
"Youth are only 25% of the population, but they are 100% of the future." - Anon
“There is no Planet B” – Anon
"Aspire to the principle, behave with virtue, abide by benevolence, and immerse yourself in the arts." - Chinese Proverb
"We cannot be the generation that history will look back upon and wonder, why didn't they do everything humanly possible to solve this biggest crisis of our time ?" - Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder
“When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement, they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable – for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.” - Amitav Ghosh, in 'The Great Derangement'
“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” - James Baldwin
"Art can't change the world, but it can change the hearts and minds of those who can." - Herbert Marcuse
"My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth." - Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95), African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor
“You may delay, but time will not.” - Benjamin Franklin
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today." - Chinese Proverb
“I put my money on the sun and solar energy, what a source of power. I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” - Thomas Edison (in 1931)
“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good ?” - Rachel Carson
"If we were miners we would be up to our knees in dead canaries." - Leo Varadkar, Prime Minister of Ireland, 2019
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” - Desmond Tutu
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.” - Margaret Atwood (in 'The Handmaid’s Tale')
“The truth will set you free, but first it’ll piss you off.” – Gloria Steinem
"Even in the darkest of times we have the right to some illumination." - Hannah Arendt
"Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence." - Osho
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” – Paul Klee
"Climate collapse is so close at hand, the window to avert our fate so narrow, that only the insane, the deeply propagandised and those so alienated from the natural world that they have lost all sense of themselves and what matters can still ignore the reality. We are teetering over the precipice." - Jonathan Cook (Journalist)
"They are as children, playing with their toys in a house on fire." - Gautama Buddha, (believed to have lived sometime between the 6th and 4th century B.C.)
"Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire ... We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is." - Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Climate Activist, speech at the Davos Institute (global gathering of neoliberal capitalist economists and politicians) in January 2019
"... it’s not just the elephant in the room; it’s the elephant on fire in the room" - Catherine Ingram
"Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art." - Ursula Le Guin, Speech at National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, 2014
“If you really want to do something you’ll find a way, if you don’t you’ll find an excuse” - Jim Rohn
The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.' - Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95), African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor
“In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith.” - John Pilger, in a critical comment about those parts of the art world which are wealth-focused, irresponsible and servile to elites and corporations
"Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, yet we're destroying the only home we have." - Jane Goodall, Primatologist, Anthropologist, and UN World Messenger for Peace
“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.” - Antonio Gutierres, United Nations General Secretary (September 2018)
“If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” - Sir David Attenborough, Broadcaster, October 2018
“We either die under this system or we change this system and replace it with one in harmony with the living world, in harmony with the needs of all humanity, now and in the future” - George Monbiot, writer and environmental activist
"Nature is alive and talking to us. This is not a metaphor." - Terence McKenna
“This isn't climate change; it’s EVERYTHING change.” - Margaret Atwood, Booker prize-winning Author and 'Under Her Eye' Ambassador
"Human rights are not things that are put on a table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect." - Wangari Maathai
"At some point in everybody's life they have to decide whether or not they believe in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris. Either you believe in it or you don't, you can't have it both ways. If you do believe in it then you have to stand up for people's human rights all over the world irrespective of their ethnicity or their religion or their nationality, which is what we are doing." - Roger Waters, Musician, member of Pink Floyd
“When the rich march, the Police mutiny. When the poor march, the Police shoot bullets.” - Sign at a protest rally in La Paz, Bolivia, November 2019
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
"If every player isn't outraged by racism, they are part of the problem." - Megan Rapinoe, USA, Footballer
"If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair." - Shirley Chisholm
“The difference between what we are doing and what we are capable of doing would solve most of the world’s problems.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.” - Chinese proverb
“This is the first century in the world's history when the biggest threat is from humanity” - Lord Rees – UK Astronomer Royal
"From the role music and the arts had in the struggle to end Apartheid, to the healing power of resistance theatre in Palestine, art and culture should never be underestimated as a driver of change." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
“If you think you are too small to make an impact, try sleeping in a room with a few mosquitoes.” – West African proverb
"Alone, we are meaningless symbols on a page. But collectively, we inspire." - Max Lucado
"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller
"We are the ones we've been waiting for" - Hopi Elder
"Act now. There is never any time but now, and there never will be any time but now." - Wallace Wattles
"You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water." - Rabindranath Tagore
“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” - David Bowie
"Only when all contribute their firewood can they build up a strong fire." - Chinese Proverb
“Overcoming Poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of Justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom” - Nelson Mandela
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas
"We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes." - Ella Baker
"Wait" has almost always meant "Never". - Martin Luther King Jr.
“Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them” - Albert Einstein
"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." - Chinese Proverb
“Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.” - Pete Seeger
"We know that the white man does not understand our ways ... He kidnaps the earth from his children, and does not care." - Chief Seattle (in 1854)
"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are." – Anon
“Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation ?” – Barry López, in his book "Arctic Dreams"
"I do not wish to be associated with BP any more than I would with an arms dealer, a tobacco salesman or anyone who wilfully destroys the lives of others alive and unborn." - Mark Rylance, Actor
"If you need a license to drive a car, you should need a license to run a corporation." - Anon
"When you drink the water, remember the spring." - Chinese proverb
"It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will." - George Monbiot
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun, And some with a fountain pen.” - Woody Guthrie in “Pretty Boy Floyd”
“People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.” - Paulo Coelho
“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” - Harriet Tubman
“We have nothing to lose except everything. So let's go ahead. This is the wager of our generation. If we are to fail, it is better, in any case, to have stood on the side of those who choose life than on the side of those who are destroying it.” - Albert Camus, Author
"The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.” – Jerzy Kosinski
“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” - Pablo Picasso
“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.” - Native American Saying
“Indeed, it’s depravity, on a scale that makes cancer denial seem trivial. Smoking kills people, and tobacco companies that tried to confuse the public about that reality were being evil. But climate change isn’t just killing people; it may well kill civilization. Trying to confuse the public about that is evil on a whole different level.” - Paul Krugman, Economist, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
"To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous." - Chinese Proverb
"Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom." - Chinese proverb
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep” - Scott Adams
"I just feel that it is so completely unfair and immoral what we are doing to future generations, we are condemning them before they are even born. We have a choice about it, that's the point, we have a choice. If it were inevitable then so be it, but we have a choice to change the future we are going to give our children." - Christiana Figueres, Head of a UN body responsible for delivering a global treaty on Climate Change (she was in tears when talking in London about the impact of global warming on future generations)
"Children learn through play; adults play through art" - Brian Eno
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou
“Life is an opportunity to contribute something that outlasts us and makes the world a better place.” - Apoorve Dubey
"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life" - Rachel Carson, scientist, writer and activist (1907 - 1964)
"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are." - Bernice Johnson Reagon
"There is no tool for development more powerful than the empowerment of women." - Kofi Annan
"Men should think twice before making widow-hood woman's only path to power." - Gloria Steinem
“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” - Malala Yousafzai
"Every night we sleep hungry. Often we dream that we are eating all night." - Fatemah, an 11year-old citizen of Yemen, comment to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 2019
"You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future before their very eyes." - Greta Thunberg
“Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them...The animals had rights - the right of man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.” - Chief Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Lakota) 1868-1939
"The love of possessions is a disease with them [Americans]. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away. If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough." - Sitting Bull
"Our dominant contemporary culture rests upon several tragically flawed premises: that humans are separate from nature, that nature is merely raw material for human use, and that it is acceptable and “natural” for humans to exert unlimited control over nature. Furthermore, contemporary culture largely regards the natural world as a fragmented collection of discrete parts, rather than as an integrated, living, co-evolving whole. This atomistic and disintegrative perspective ignores current scientific knowledge and distorts our sense of self, nature, community, economy, and democracy." - David Abram
"... What if there were another system and jurisprudence, based upon the concept that the planet and all of its species have rights — and they have those rights by virtue of their existence as component members of a single Earth community ? ... there is a need for a jurisprudence that recognizes that the well-being of the integral world community is primary and that human well-being is derivative." - Thomas Berry
“Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.” - Albert Schweitzer
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it does otherwise." - Aldo Leopold (1949)
"Those societies on the wrong side of nature have no future." - Rob Newman, in 'The Extinction Tapes', a radio series, 2019.
"Despite all our accomplishments we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains." - attributed to both Paul Harvey and the Farm Equipment Association, USA.
“If not us then who ? If not now, then when ?” - John Lewis former Freedom Rider
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." – Bertrand Russell
“Whether voting Republican or Democrat, the result is the same: A corrupt corporate government.” - Steven Magee
“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” – Lily Tomlin
“The privileged individuals and families who comprise the global elite will happily bankrupt their own countrymen, decimate their own community and evict their neighbors from houses in their desperate bid to increase their wealth.” - James Morcan
“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.” - Suzy Kassem
“I find it very sad that by the time corporate science realizes the value of nature, that it may be too late” - Steven Magee
“Profit maximization is the murderous strategy of global corporation hierarchies” – Jean Ziegler
“I realised our planetary ecological crisis would not be solved in the corporate boardrooms in which it was created.” - Carina Millstone
“Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.” - Suzy Kassem
“Mr. President : Over 4,000 peaceful protesters have been arrested. While bankers continue to destroy the economy with impunity. You must stop the assault on our 1st amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.” - Ryan Hirsch, a small handwritten note handed to President Barack Obama (USA) after a public speech in 2011
"As a human being, I am completely connected to nature. My existence, my life, my culture – is the natural environment. My survival and my creativity depend on it." - Brazilian artist Frans Krajeberg (1921-2017)
"If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere." - Vincent Van Gogh
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” - Aldo Leopold (in 'A Sand County Almanac')
“Know that you are completely insignificant, and entirely necessary.” - Mahatma Gandhi
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice then you have chosen the side of the oppressor." - Desmond Tutu
“Almost always the creative dedicated minority has made the world better” – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“Never come upon an injustice you do not pause to fix” - Spoken by Harry Belafonte's Mum to him
"Justice delayed, is justice denied." - William Gladstone, British politician (1809 - 1898)
"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly, than ever before." - Leonard Bernstein in “An Artist’s Response to Violence”
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” - Marc Riboud, French Photographer, 1923-2016
"A bird does not sing because he has the answer to something, he sings because he has a song." - Chinese proverb
“We have seen the physical effects of the atomic bomb on the Japanese people, but it is too early to see the spiritual effects on the people who made and used the bomb, the Americans.” - Mahatma Gandhi, spoken shortly after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima
“The world is a dangerous place to live in; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” - Albert Einstein
“The growing wealth aquired by them [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses.” - President James Madison
“Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.” - Will Rogers
"…a sustainable future depends on the people willing to see the truth for what it is, and for those to stand up in unison in order to make a difference." - Jake Edwards Keli'i Eakin
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” - George Orwell
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” - Albert Einstein
“The world would be a better place if more people spent their time making music and less time fighting” - Matt Black (Musician, Coldcut)
“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
“Activism is my rent for living on this planet” – Alice Walker
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment” – Ansel Adams
"One generation plants the trees, another gets the shade." - Chinese proverb
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority." - E. B. White
"There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness" - Mahatma Gandhi
“If we don’t speak up, we are cowards and accomplices.” - Judith Hertog, on China’s repression in Tibet
“Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?” - Eleanor Roosevelt
"All around the world, women are detoxifying age old concepts of leadership to reflect a more cooperative, caring and creative approach. They are leading the way towards a radically inclusive world where everyone can flourish." - Farhana Yamin
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
“My fellow citizens, the rise of this blusterous man bewilders the educated among us, conjoins opposing politicians, agonizes our international allies, threatens minorities, spits on the disabled, and touches the hearts of those who just don’t know any better. Let us stop propounding how mad all this is, but instead, do something. – Lislotte Hubner (Germany, 1929)
“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” - William Shakespeare
“The greatest threat facing the United States is its own President” – Washington Post
"Patriotism is not obedience to government. Patriotism is obedience to the principles for which government is supposed to stand." - Howard Zinn
“Leadership by deception isn't leadership. It's fraud.” - DaShanne Stokes
“Dear America : you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that a third of your people would kill another third, while a third watches”. - Werner Herzog, stated at the beginning of Trump’s presidency.
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” - Thomas Jefferson
"It used to be said that 'Patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel' but, looking at this man (Trump), it seems to be his first resort." - Anon
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” - Howard Zinn
"No man is wise enough, or good enough to be trusted with unlimited power." - Charles Caleb Colton
"I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses." - Adolf Hitler
"If you plan for one year, plant rice. If you plan for ten years plant trees. If you plan for a hundred years, educate mankind." - Chinese proverb
"Wise men build bridges but fools build walls" - Ancient Chinese Proverb
"When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills." - Ancient Chinese proverb
“A nation cannot survive treason - from within” - Marxus Tullius Cicero
“A fish rots from the head down.” - Ancient proverb of disputed origin
“Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.” - Bob Dylan
“To befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. - President Theodore Roosevelt
“Corrupt governments are run by corrupt politicians that run corrupt law enforcement agencies.” - Steven Magee
“One politician can not make a government. He needs accomplices.” - Ljupka Cvetanova
“Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interests of powerful people.” - Paul Krugman, Economist, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
“Remember the golden rule : Those who have the gold make the rules” - Anon
"Russian oligarchy is economic survival of the fittest, the ultimate, balls-out Darwinian experiment in wealth consolidation by the most wicked, immoral and dishonest - government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich at the expense and misery of everyone else.” - Matt Szajer, author of 'The Trump-Russia Hustle'
“Where there’s corruption in government, somebody or everybody’s making a lot of money. That makes it dangerous.” - Kenneth Eade
"Whoever you vote for, the Bastards always get into power." - Anon
“When you're dealing with frauds and liars, listen more to what they don't say than what they do.” - DaShanne Stokes
“When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'.” - USA President Theodore Roosevelt
“Failing to indict a criminal sitting president sends the message that those in power are above the law.” - DaShanne Stokes
“Behind the facade of elected government are a bunch of corporate controlled gangsters running the country.” - Steven Magee
“What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them ?” - Andrew P. Napolitano
“There are honest politicians. They haven't won the elections yet.” - Ljupka Cvetanova
“Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere” - Millicent Garrett Fawcett
“Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.” - David Korten
"What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity." - Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95), African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor
“I am very honoured and happy to be the European representative at this year’s World Theatre Day. In 1963, my predecessor the great Arthur Miller said as the threat of nuclear war lay heavy over the world : “When asked to write in a time when diplomacy and politics have such terribly short and feeble arms, the delicate but sometimes lengthy reach of art must bear the burden of holding together the human community." - Simon McBurney (a founder and artistic director of Théâtre de Complicité, London, and elected European Ambassador for World Theatre 2018 by UNESCO).
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul" - Edward Abbey
“Art disturbs, science reassures.” – Georges Braque
“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“The origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation.” - Mercy Otis Warren
“Our leadership has failed us. Young people must hold older generations accountable for the mess they have created. We need to get angry, and transform that anger into action.” - Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Climate Activist
“Neutral men are the devil’s allies.” - Edwin Hubbel Chapin
“Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past, while we silence the rebels of the present.” - Henry Steele Commager
“No re-plastering, the structure is rotten." – Slogan of French student protestors in 1968
"The rights of working people, of women, of black people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves ... The court has always been a political body. They only come around to the side of justice when the country shows them they must." - Howard Zinn
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” –Dresden James
“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” - Maximilien de Robespierre
“A country in which 42% of the population is totally misinformed is not a country where democracy is safe.” - Paul Craig Roberts
”Polls are the corporate media’s standardized tests to determine how well we have learned what it has taught us.” – Sam Smith, author and journalist
“When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective,’ all else is `propaganda.” - ironic comment by the legendary American broadcaster Studs Terkel
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” - Aldous Huxley
"Until the Lions find their storytellers their story will always be told by the hunter." - African proverb
"When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie." - Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko (referring to the failures of the media)
“We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask.” - Ben Ehrenreich, writing on Camp X-Ray (Guantanamo Bay prison)
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"In art there is only one thing that counts : The bit that cannot be explained." - Georges Braque
“That art is best which suggests most.” – Austin O’Malley
“As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it’s my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what’s happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.” - Jonas Mekas
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” - Audre Lorde
"Cultivate new normals into your existence in abnormal times" - Paula Dawn Lietz (Photographic Artist)
“It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be. This can only be done if we face the reality of what oppression really means in our lives, not as abstract systems subject to analysis, but as an avalanche of traumas leaving a wake of devastation in the lives of real people who nevertheless remain human, unquenchable, complex and full of possibility” - Aurora Levins Morales
"There's no telling what can come from supporting a curious mind trying to discover something new." - Donna Strickland
“The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth - soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilise them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research.” - Rachel Carson, Scientist and Ecologist in a 1953 letter to the Washington Post.
"The one who plants trees has started to understand the meaning of life." - Anon
"Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come." - Chinese Proverb
"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." - Jane Goodall
"We cannot of course save the world, because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. This is everyone's calling; to lead a life that helps." - Barry Lopez, 'Eden As A Conversation'
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” - Howard Zinn
He who cheats the earth will be cheated by the earth. - Chinese Proverb
“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.” - Pablo Picasso
“The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.” - David Smail
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt
”The art of convincing decent people to forget the lesser of two evils is also evil.” – Edward Snowden
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” – Jonathan Swift
“At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rain forest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.” - Chico Mendes, Amazonian Environmental Activist, spoken a year before he was murdered in 1988, aged 44
“The USA is a beautiful country...when you take the corrupt corporations and their government minions out of the equation.” - Steven Magee
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability." - Arundhati Roy
“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. . . The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
“It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
“Civilisations fall apart when we stop caring for our fellow men.” - Katherine Hamnett, designer
"For evil to flourish, it only takes good men & women to do nothing" - Quotation inspired by Simon Wiesenthal
“There comes a time when silence equals betrayal.” - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“To ignore evil is to become accomplice to it.” - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it’s not a political issue – it’s a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That’s a renewable resource. Let’s renew it.” - Al Gore, former Vice-President of the USA, joint winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in" - Rosa Parks
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” – Albert Einstein, refugee from Nazi Germany
"Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other." - Elie Wiesel
“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation.” - Coretta Scott King
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“What kind of economy grows for decades on end but doesn’t allow most of the population to share in the gains from that growth ?” – Mark Weisbrot
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” – Edward Abbey
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth Boulding
“In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it’s unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.” – Mollie Beattie
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” - Maya Angelou
“Yes, our regulatory agencies are incompetent. But they are incompetent by design.” –David Goldstein
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” - Douglas Adams (Author)
"We have guided missiles and misguided men." – Rev Martin Luther King, warning that : “We live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation.”
“Art has become more and more important because politicians have become less and less interesting. They have to accommodate some kind of idea, and they can’t say what they want to. Even a speech is written for them, and then they read it. That position is extremely weak. It’s extremely dangerous for us. An artist creates; artists are still creating. The artist’s position is completely opposite to that of a politician. We’re still free. We can still say what we want to say. You have to be daring to say it, but you can say it. You don’t lose your job if you say it. Whereas the politicians may lose their job if they say anything they want to. The people have the right to know, they hired the politicians. We can touch people.” - Yoko Ono
“The mess we are living in is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few.”- Reni Eddo-Lodge
“Where there is a need, there is an obligation” – Simone Weil
“The roots of violence : wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles.” - Gandhi
“War Is A Racket” – Major General Smedley Butler
"If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.” - Author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges
"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, 'Mother, what was war ?'" - E Mirriam
“If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it’s probably not broad enough a coalition.” - Bernice Reagon, of the pop/gospel group 'Sweet Honey in the Rock.'
"Pearls don't lie on the seashore. If you want one, you must dive for it." - Chinese proverb
“The time is always right to do what is right.” - Rev Martin Luther King Jr.
"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it." - Wendell Berry
"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature." - Joseph Campbell
"Respect existence or expect resistance." - Protest slogan
“…progressives need a language that is missing from our political vocabulary, one that insists that… “alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.” - Ariel Dorfman
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Nay, human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - - Ursula Le Guin, Recipient of National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, 2014
Maybe you can pick one or two of these each day or week, to stick on your wall, or write in your notebook, or carry around to inspire you ?
WANT TO SHARPEN YOUR ETHICAL 'EDGE' ?
If you can set aside the time (maybe in stages) to read through all of these quotations you will find yourself receiving an informal education in Ethics. These Quotations can help you to sharpen your ethical 'edge'. They will help you think about, clarify and strengthen your own values and principles. Included here are words from some of the wisest humanitarians who have ever lived.
These quotations can change the way you look at the world, the way you judge what's going on in the world. That can be a first step in changing things. Some of the thoughts below have inspired and sustained billions of people. Many of our users return to these Quotations again and again.
Please let us know if you have been inspired by these Quotations - and send us your own suggestions for inclusion. Send to : redlineartworks@yahoo.co.uk
THE QUOTATIONS :
"The very notion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political position." - George Orwell
“It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.” - Molière
“We are the last generation that can fight climate change. We have a duty to act” - Ban Ki-moon (former Secretary-General of the United Nations)
"The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized." - Rachel Carson, scientist, writer and activist (1907 - 1964)
“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” – Chinese Proverb
"Take your broken heart, and make it into art." - Meryl Streep, at the 2017 Golden Globes Ceremony
"What we decide to do collectively as a species politically, globally, over the next decade is going to determine the future of the next generations in terms of the habitability of the planet and what sort of environment they live in." - Jonathan Bamber, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Bristol, UK
"There is little hope of world leaders taking the action required to keep the world temperature from increasing more than 2°C, let alone 1.5°C” - Simon Pirani, Senior Research Fellow at the UK’s Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in his 2019 book : 'Burning Up, A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption', a detailed study into the burning of fossil fuels since 1950.
“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.” – Helen Keller
"All things are difficult before they are easy." - Chinese proverb
"Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today." - Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Climate Activist
"I do not want the blood of my grandchildren on my hands." - Dina Jung, 77 year-old retired teacher, UK
"Youth are only 25% of the population, but they are 100% of the future." - Anon
“There is no Planet B” – Anon
"Aspire to the principle, behave with virtue, abide by benevolence, and immerse yourself in the arts." - Chinese Proverb
"We cannot be the generation that history will look back upon and wonder, why didn't they do everything humanly possible to solve this biggest crisis of our time ?" - Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder
“When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement, they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable – for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.” - Amitav Ghosh, in 'The Great Derangement'
“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” - James Baldwin
"Art can't change the world, but it can change the hearts and minds of those who can." - Herbert Marcuse
"My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth." - Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95), African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor
“You may delay, but time will not.” - Benjamin Franklin
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today." - Chinese Proverb
“I put my money on the sun and solar energy, what a source of power. I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” - Thomas Edison (in 1931)
“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good ?” - Rachel Carson
"If we were miners we would be up to our knees in dead canaries." - Leo Varadkar, Prime Minister of Ireland, 2019
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” - Desmond Tutu
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.” - Margaret Atwood (in 'The Handmaid’s Tale')
“The truth will set you free, but first it’ll piss you off.” – Gloria Steinem
"Even in the darkest of times we have the right to some illumination." - Hannah Arendt
"Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence." - Osho
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” – Paul Klee
"Climate collapse is so close at hand, the window to avert our fate so narrow, that only the insane, the deeply propagandised and those so alienated from the natural world that they have lost all sense of themselves and what matters can still ignore the reality. We are teetering over the precipice." - Jonathan Cook (Journalist)
"They are as children, playing with their toys in a house on fire." - Gautama Buddha, (believed to have lived sometime between the 6th and 4th century B.C.)
"Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire ... We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is." - Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Climate Activist, speech at the Davos Institute (global gathering of neoliberal capitalist economists and politicians) in January 2019
"... it’s not just the elephant in the room; it’s the elephant on fire in the room" - Catherine Ingram
"Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art." - Ursula Le Guin, Speech at National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, 2014
“If you really want to do something you’ll find a way, if you don’t you’ll find an excuse” - Jim Rohn
The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.' - Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95), African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor
“In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith.” - John Pilger, in a critical comment about those parts of the art world which are wealth-focused, irresponsible and servile to elites and corporations
"Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, yet we're destroying the only home we have." - Jane Goodall, Primatologist, Anthropologist, and UN World Messenger for Peace
“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.” - Antonio Gutierres, United Nations General Secretary (September 2018)
“If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” - Sir David Attenborough, Broadcaster, October 2018
“We either die under this system or we change this system and replace it with one in harmony with the living world, in harmony with the needs of all humanity, now and in the future” - George Monbiot, writer and environmental activist
"Nature is alive and talking to us. This is not a metaphor." - Terence McKenna
“This isn't climate change; it’s EVERYTHING change.” - Margaret Atwood, Booker prize-winning Author and 'Under Her Eye' Ambassador
"Human rights are not things that are put on a table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect." - Wangari Maathai
"At some point in everybody's life they have to decide whether or not they believe in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris. Either you believe in it or you don't, you can't have it both ways. If you do believe in it then you have to stand up for people's human rights all over the world irrespective of their ethnicity or their religion or their nationality, which is what we are doing." - Roger Waters, Musician, member of Pink Floyd
“When the rich march, the Police mutiny. When the poor march, the Police shoot bullets.” - Sign at a protest rally in La Paz, Bolivia, November 2019
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
"If every player isn't outraged by racism, they are part of the problem." - Megan Rapinoe, USA, Footballer
"If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair." - Shirley Chisholm
“The difference between what we are doing and what we are capable of doing would solve most of the world’s problems.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.” - Chinese proverb
“This is the first century in the world's history when the biggest threat is from humanity” - Lord Rees – UK Astronomer Royal
"From the role music and the arts had in the struggle to end Apartheid, to the healing power of resistance theatre in Palestine, art and culture should never be underestimated as a driver of change." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
“If you think you are too small to make an impact, try sleeping in a room with a few mosquitoes.” – West African proverb
"Alone, we are meaningless symbols on a page. But collectively, we inspire." - Max Lucado
"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller
"We are the ones we've been waiting for" - Hopi Elder
"Act now. There is never any time but now, and there never will be any time but now." - Wallace Wattles
"You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water." - Rabindranath Tagore
“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” - David Bowie
"Only when all contribute their firewood can they build up a strong fire." - Chinese Proverb
“Overcoming Poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of Justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom” - Nelson Mandela
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas
"We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes." - Ella Baker
"Wait" has almost always meant "Never". - Martin Luther King Jr.
“Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them” - Albert Einstein
"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." - Chinese Proverb
“Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.” - Pete Seeger
"We know that the white man does not understand our ways ... He kidnaps the earth from his children, and does not care." - Chief Seattle (in 1854)
"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are." – Anon
“Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation ?” – Barry López, in his book "Arctic Dreams"
"I do not wish to be associated with BP any more than I would with an arms dealer, a tobacco salesman or anyone who wilfully destroys the lives of others alive and unborn." - Mark Rylance, Actor
"If you need a license to drive a car, you should need a license to run a corporation." - Anon
"When you drink the water, remember the spring." - Chinese proverb
"It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will." - George Monbiot
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” - Mahatma Gandhi
“Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun, And some with a fountain pen.” - Woody Guthrie in “Pretty Boy Floyd”
“People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.” - Paulo Coelho
“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” - Harriet Tubman
“We have nothing to lose except everything. So let's go ahead. This is the wager of our generation. If we are to fail, it is better, in any case, to have stood on the side of those who choose life than on the side of those who are destroying it.” - Albert Camus, Author
"The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.” – Jerzy Kosinski
“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” - Pablo Picasso
“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.” - Native American Saying
“Indeed, it’s depravity, on a scale that makes cancer denial seem trivial. Smoking kills people, and tobacco companies that tried to confuse the public about that reality were being evil. But climate change isn’t just killing people; it may well kill civilization. Trying to confuse the public about that is evil on a whole different level.” - Paul Krugman, Economist, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
"To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous." - Chinese Proverb
"Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom." - Chinese proverb
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep” - Scott Adams
"I just feel that it is so completely unfair and immoral what we are doing to future generations, we are condemning them before they are even born. We have a choice about it, that's the point, we have a choice. If it were inevitable then so be it, but we have a choice to change the future we are going to give our children." - Christiana Figueres, Head of a UN body responsible for delivering a global treaty on Climate Change (she was in tears when talking in London about the impact of global warming on future generations)
"Children learn through play; adults play through art" - Brian Eno
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou
“Life is an opportunity to contribute something that outlasts us and makes the world a better place.” - Apoorve Dubey
"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life" - Rachel Carson, scientist, writer and activist (1907 - 1964)
"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are." - Bernice Johnson Reagon
"There is no tool for development more powerful than the empowerment of women." - Kofi Annan
"Men should think twice before making widow-hood woman's only path to power." - Gloria Steinem
“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” - Malala Yousafzai
"Every night we sleep hungry. Often we dream that we are eating all night." - Fatemah, an 11year-old citizen of Yemen, comment to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 2019
"You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future before their very eyes." - Greta Thunberg
“Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them...The animals had rights - the right of man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.” - Chief Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Lakota) 1868-1939
"The love of possessions is a disease with them [Americans]. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away. If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough." - Sitting Bull
"Our dominant contemporary culture rests upon several tragically flawed premises: that humans are separate from nature, that nature is merely raw material for human use, and that it is acceptable and “natural” for humans to exert unlimited control over nature. Furthermore, contemporary culture largely regards the natural world as a fragmented collection of discrete parts, rather than as an integrated, living, co-evolving whole. This atomistic and disintegrative perspective ignores current scientific knowledge and distorts our sense of self, nature, community, economy, and democracy." - David Abram
"... What if there were another system and jurisprudence, based upon the concept that the planet and all of its species have rights — and they have those rights by virtue of their existence as component members of a single Earth community ? ... there is a need for a jurisprudence that recognizes that the well-being of the integral world community is primary and that human well-being is derivative." - Thomas Berry
“Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.” - Albert Schweitzer
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it does otherwise." - Aldo Leopold (1949)
"Those societies on the wrong side of nature have no future." - Rob Newman, in 'The Extinction Tapes', a radio series, 2019.
"Despite all our accomplishments we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains." - attributed to both Paul Harvey and the Farm Equipment Association, USA.
“If not us then who ? If not now, then when ?” - John Lewis former Freedom Rider
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." – Bertrand Russell
“Whether voting Republican or Democrat, the result is the same: A corrupt corporate government.” - Steven Magee
“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” – Lily Tomlin
“The privileged individuals and families who comprise the global elite will happily bankrupt their own countrymen, decimate their own community and evict their neighbors from houses in their desperate bid to increase their wealth.” - James Morcan
“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.” - Suzy Kassem
“I find it very sad that by the time corporate science realizes the value of nature, that it may be too late” - Steven Magee
“Profit maximization is the murderous strategy of global corporation hierarchies” – Jean Ziegler
“I realised our planetary ecological crisis would not be solved in the corporate boardrooms in which it was created.” - Carina Millstone
“Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.” - Suzy Kassem
“Mr. President : Over 4,000 peaceful protesters have been arrested. While bankers continue to destroy the economy with impunity. You must stop the assault on our 1st amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.” - Ryan Hirsch, a small handwritten note handed to President Barack Obama (USA) after a public speech in 2011
"As a human being, I am completely connected to nature. My existence, my life, my culture – is the natural environment. My survival and my creativity depend on it." - Brazilian artist Frans Krajeberg (1921-2017)
"If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere." - Vincent Van Gogh
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” - Aldo Leopold (in 'A Sand County Almanac')
“Know that you are completely insignificant, and entirely necessary.” - Mahatma Gandhi
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice then you have chosen the side of the oppressor." - Desmond Tutu
“Almost always the creative dedicated minority has made the world better” – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“Never come upon an injustice you do not pause to fix” - Spoken by Harry Belafonte's Mum to him
"Justice delayed, is justice denied." - William Gladstone, British politician (1809 - 1898)
"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly, than ever before." - Leonard Bernstein in “An Artist’s Response to Violence”
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” - Marc Riboud, French Photographer, 1923-2016
"A bird does not sing because he has the answer to something, he sings because he has a song." - Chinese proverb
“We have seen the physical effects of the atomic bomb on the Japanese people, but it is too early to see the spiritual effects on the people who made and used the bomb, the Americans.” - Mahatma Gandhi, spoken shortly after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima
“The world is a dangerous place to live in; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” - Albert Einstein
“The growing wealth aquired by them [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses.” - President James Madison
“Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.” - Will Rogers
"…a sustainable future depends on the people willing to see the truth for what it is, and for those to stand up in unison in order to make a difference." - Jake Edwards Keli'i Eakin
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” - George Orwell
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” - Albert Einstein
“The world would be a better place if more people spent their time making music and less time fighting” - Matt Black (Musician, Coldcut)
“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
“Activism is my rent for living on this planet” – Alice Walker
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment” – Ansel Adams
"One generation plants the trees, another gets the shade." - Chinese proverb
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority." - E. B. White
"There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness" - Mahatma Gandhi
“If we don’t speak up, we are cowards and accomplices.” - Judith Hertog, on China’s repression in Tibet
“Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?” - Eleanor Roosevelt
"All around the world, women are detoxifying age old concepts of leadership to reflect a more cooperative, caring and creative approach. They are leading the way towards a radically inclusive world where everyone can flourish." - Farhana Yamin
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
“My fellow citizens, the rise of this blusterous man bewilders the educated among us, conjoins opposing politicians, agonizes our international allies, threatens minorities, spits on the disabled, and touches the hearts of those who just don’t know any better. Let us stop propounding how mad all this is, but instead, do something. – Lislotte Hubner (Germany, 1929)
“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” - William Shakespeare
“The greatest threat facing the United States is its own President” – Washington Post
"Patriotism is not obedience to government. Patriotism is obedience to the principles for which government is supposed to stand." - Howard Zinn
“Leadership by deception isn't leadership. It's fraud.” - DaShanne Stokes
“Dear America : you are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that a third of your people would kill another third, while a third watches”. - Werner Herzog, stated at the beginning of Trump’s presidency.
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” - Thomas Jefferson
"It used to be said that 'Patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel' but, looking at this man (Trump), it seems to be his first resort." - Anon
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” - Howard Zinn
"No man is wise enough, or good enough to be trusted with unlimited power." - Charles Caleb Colton
"I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses." - Adolf Hitler
"If you plan for one year, plant rice. If you plan for ten years plant trees. If you plan for a hundred years, educate mankind." - Chinese proverb
"Wise men build bridges but fools build walls" - Ancient Chinese Proverb
"When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills." - Ancient Chinese proverb
“A nation cannot survive treason - from within” - Marxus Tullius Cicero
“A fish rots from the head down.” - Ancient proverb of disputed origin
“Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.” - Bob Dylan
“To befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. - President Theodore Roosevelt
“Corrupt governments are run by corrupt politicians that run corrupt law enforcement agencies.” - Steven Magee
“One politician can not make a government. He needs accomplices.” - Ljupka Cvetanova
“Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interests of powerful people.” - Paul Krugman, Economist, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
“Remember the golden rule : Those who have the gold make the rules” - Anon
"Russian oligarchy is economic survival of the fittest, the ultimate, balls-out Darwinian experiment in wealth consolidation by the most wicked, immoral and dishonest - government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich at the expense and misery of everyone else.” - Matt Szajer, author of 'The Trump-Russia Hustle'
“Where there’s corruption in government, somebody or everybody’s making a lot of money. That makes it dangerous.” - Kenneth Eade
"Whoever you vote for, the Bastards always get into power." - Anon
“When you're dealing with frauds and liars, listen more to what they don't say than what they do.” - DaShanne Stokes
“When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'.” - USA President Theodore Roosevelt
“Failing to indict a criminal sitting president sends the message that those in power are above the law.” - DaShanne Stokes
“Behind the facade of elected government are a bunch of corporate controlled gangsters running the country.” - Steven Magee
“What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them ?” - Andrew P. Napolitano
“There are honest politicians. They haven't won the elections yet.” - Ljupka Cvetanova
“Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere” - Millicent Garrett Fawcett
“Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.” - David Korten
"What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity." - Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95), African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor
“I am very honoured and happy to be the European representative at this year’s World Theatre Day. In 1963, my predecessor the great Arthur Miller said as the threat of nuclear war lay heavy over the world : “When asked to write in a time when diplomacy and politics have such terribly short and feeble arms, the delicate but sometimes lengthy reach of art must bear the burden of holding together the human community." - Simon McBurney (a founder and artistic director of Théâtre de Complicité, London, and elected European Ambassador for World Theatre 2018 by UNESCO).
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul" - Edward Abbey
“Art disturbs, science reassures.” – Georges Braque
“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“The origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation.” - Mercy Otis Warren
“Our leadership has failed us. Young people must hold older generations accountable for the mess they have created. We need to get angry, and transform that anger into action.” - Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Climate Activist
“Neutral men are the devil’s allies.” - Edwin Hubbel Chapin
“Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past, while we silence the rebels of the present.” - Henry Steele Commager
“No re-plastering, the structure is rotten." – Slogan of French student protestors in 1968
"The rights of working people, of women, of black people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves ... The court has always been a political body. They only come around to the side of justice when the country shows them they must." - Howard Zinn
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” –Dresden James
“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” - Maximilien de Robespierre
“A country in which 42% of the population is totally misinformed is not a country where democracy is safe.” - Paul Craig Roberts
”Polls are the corporate media’s standardized tests to determine how well we have learned what it has taught us.” – Sam Smith, author and journalist
“When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective,’ all else is `propaganda.” - ironic comment by the legendary American broadcaster Studs Terkel
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” - Aldous Huxley
"Until the Lions find their storytellers their story will always be told by the hunter." - African proverb
"When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie." - Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko (referring to the failures of the media)
“We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask.” - Ben Ehrenreich, writing on Camp X-Ray (Guantanamo Bay prison)
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"In art there is only one thing that counts : The bit that cannot be explained." - Georges Braque
“That art is best which suggests most.” – Austin O’Malley
“As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it’s my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what’s happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.” - Jonas Mekas
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” - Audre Lorde
"Cultivate new normals into your existence in abnormal times" - Paula Dawn Lietz (Photographic Artist)
“It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be. This can only be done if we face the reality of what oppression really means in our lives, not as abstract systems subject to analysis, but as an avalanche of traumas leaving a wake of devastation in the lives of real people who nevertheless remain human, unquenchable, complex and full of possibility” - Aurora Levins Morales
"There's no telling what can come from supporting a curious mind trying to discover something new." - Donna Strickland
“The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth - soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilise them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research.” - Rachel Carson, Scientist and Ecologist in a 1953 letter to the Washington Post.
"The one who plants trees has started to understand the meaning of life." - Anon
"Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come." - Chinese Proverb
"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." - Jane Goodall
"We cannot of course save the world, because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. This is everyone's calling; to lead a life that helps." - Barry Lopez, 'Eden As A Conversation'
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” - Howard Zinn
He who cheats the earth will be cheated by the earth. - Chinese Proverb
“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.” - Pablo Picasso
“The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.” - David Smail
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt
”The art of convincing decent people to forget the lesser of two evils is also evil.” – Edward Snowden
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” – Jonathan Swift
“At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rain forest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.” - Chico Mendes, Amazonian Environmental Activist, spoken a year before he was murdered in 1988, aged 44
“The USA is a beautiful country...when you take the corrupt corporations and their government minions out of the equation.” - Steven Magee
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability." - Arundhati Roy
“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. . . The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
“It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
“Civilisations fall apart when we stop caring for our fellow men.” - Katherine Hamnett, designer
"For evil to flourish, it only takes good men & women to do nothing" - Quotation inspired by Simon Wiesenthal
“There comes a time when silence equals betrayal.” - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“To ignore evil is to become accomplice to it.” - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
“My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it’s not a political issue – it’s a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That’s a renewable resource. Let’s renew it.” - Al Gore, former Vice-President of the USA, joint winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in" - Rosa Parks
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” – Albert Einstein, refugee from Nazi Germany
"Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other." - Elie Wiesel
“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation.” - Coretta Scott King
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“What kind of economy grows for decades on end but doesn’t allow most of the population to share in the gains from that growth ?” – Mark Weisbrot
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” – Edward Abbey
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth Boulding
“In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it’s unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.” – Mollie Beattie
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” - Maya Angelou
“Yes, our regulatory agencies are incompetent. But they are incompetent by design.” –David Goldstein
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” - Douglas Adams (Author)
"We have guided missiles and misguided men." – Rev Martin Luther King, warning that : “We live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation.”
“Art has become more and more important because politicians have become less and less interesting. They have to accommodate some kind of idea, and they can’t say what they want to. Even a speech is written for them, and then they read it. That position is extremely weak. It’s extremely dangerous for us. An artist creates; artists are still creating. The artist’s position is completely opposite to that of a politician. We’re still free. We can still say what we want to say. You have to be daring to say it, but you can say it. You don’t lose your job if you say it. Whereas the politicians may lose their job if they say anything they want to. The people have the right to know, they hired the politicians. We can touch people.” - Yoko Ono
“The mess we are living in is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few.”- Reni Eddo-Lodge
“Where there is a need, there is an obligation” – Simone Weil
“The roots of violence : wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles.” - Gandhi
“War Is A Racket” – Major General Smedley Butler
"If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.” - Author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges
"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, 'Mother, what was war ?'" - E Mirriam
“If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it’s probably not broad enough a coalition.” - Bernice Reagon, of the pop/gospel group 'Sweet Honey in the Rock.'
"Pearls don't lie on the seashore. If you want one, you must dive for it." - Chinese proverb
“The time is always right to do what is right.” - Rev Martin Luther King Jr.
"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it." - Wendell Berry
"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature." - Joseph Campbell
"Respect existence or expect resistance." - Protest slogan
“…progressives need a language that is missing from our political vocabulary, one that insists that… “alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.” - Ariel Dorfman
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Nay, human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - - Ursula Le Guin, Recipient of National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, 2014
