FAVOURITE QUOTES


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
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King Jr.
If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliché that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.
John Lennon
If no one out there understands start your own revolution and cut out the middleman.
Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards, Billy Bragg
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
Unconfirmed but often attributed to George Orwell
I think masculinity and femininity, it's something that's very old fashioned. There's a whole new generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with.
Johnny Weir
Don't let them tell you it can't be done. My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
Jack Layton


They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Andy Warhol
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
Nelson Mandela
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Don't blow it — good planets are hard to find.
quoted in Time Magazine, 1996
If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.
British Labour leader Neil Kinnock's warning to the public, 1983
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabindranath Tagore
Nothing in the world is easier — or lazier — than the perpetual sneer.
L Garvin (Globe & Mail commenter)
Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you've got to be kind.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut


Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight,
got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.
Lovers in a Dangerous Time, Bruce Cockburn
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
Desmond Tutu
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, Philip K. Dick
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.
Irene Peter
Painting is not made to decorate rooms. It is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.
Pablo Picasso
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
"The Triumph of Stupidity," Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell's American Essays, 1931-1935, Bertrand Russell
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
Ferdinand Foch
Hope is the last thing ever lost.
Italian proverb
Say what you know, do what you must, come what may.
Sofia Kovalevskaya
I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, reacting to the death of John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
Alice Walker


The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
The Village, directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan
As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.
Patti Smith
Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.
Iain Thomas
It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.
Lena Horne
Just the attitude alone makes me sad: ‘We have to help our girls and teach them to be confident.’ Well, guess what, young girls. You aren’t damsels in distress. You aren’t hostages to the words of your peers. You aren’t the victims that even your well-meaning teachers and advocates think you are.
Mindy Kaling 
The pursuit of truth is a form of courage.
George Santayana
Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Winston Churchill
In art, as in life, everything is possible, if it is based on love.
Marc Chagall
Why does fascism deny the very violence it encourages? Because fascism’s logic is this: It didn’t happen, and if it did, they made us do it.
Umair Haque


The good Earth — we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.
A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
You get what you settle for.
Thelma & Louise, written by Callie Khouri
Time is the longest distance between two places.
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
It wasn't his [the Exxon Valdez captain's] driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.
Greenpeace advertisement caption, New York Times, 25 February 1990
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.
Louis Nizer
The soul has no gender.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes 
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde


The pleasure offered by the Star Wars films corresponds very closely to our basic conditioning; it is extremely reactionary, as all mindless and automatic pleasure tends to be. The finer pleasures are those we have to work for.
Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era, Robin Wood
Not all those who wander are lost.
The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Sexism is a social disease.
Unknown
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw
Capitalism unchecked is not a democratic system.
Serj Tankian
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Maslow
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Unknown
The children almost broken by the world become the adults most likely to change it.
Frank Warren
You will never see adults more scared of a YA novel than when the teenagers in it are acting like actual teenagers.
Courtney Summers

We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Poem for South African Women, June Jordan

An optimist is someone who thinks the future is uncertain.
 Howard Lindsay

History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins
Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
  Robert A. Heinlein
Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
Ray Bradbury
If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.
John Steinbeck
Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.
Cormac McCarthy