Quotes That Inspire
“Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful.”
-Rev. William Sloane Coffin, anti-war leader
“[He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people. But by one's inner self. Everyone forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
“It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama [the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939] as a personal tragedy.”
-Albert Camus
“When we fight about education, we’re fighting for our lives. We’re fighting for what that education will give us, we’re fighting for a job, we’re fighting to eat, we’re fighting to pay our medical bills, we’re fighting for a lot of things.
So, this is a total fight with us.”
-Ruth Batson, a leader in the fight for better schools in Boston from 1950-1990
Two months before his death when speaking to the congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. King said this is how he wished to be remembered:
“I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.
“I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. And I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major. Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.”
“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King intoned. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter” (King, “The Drum Major,” 185–186).
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
-Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address
“The only reasons superior persons remain superior is because coal miners sweat their guts out in the bowels of the earth.”
-George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier
“God is not terribly just. You know, when you’ve seen all those people off on the trains, later on you have some things to settle with Him. And they all passed by me because I stood there by the gate from the first day to the last. All of them. Four hundred thousand people passed right by me.”
-Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943
Edelman was not like the biblical Job saying “why me,” but instead dared to say ‘woe unto God’. To advance the fiction that the Jews being deported to death camps were just being resettled, Edelman as a hospital worker was allowed by the Nazis to pull people off the trains if they had an infectious disease. Instead, he especially pulled off members of his resistance organization.
“Each of us carried in his heart a separate war which in many ways was totally different, despite our common cause….But we also shared a common sorrow, the immense sorrow of war. It was a sublime sorrow, more sublime than happiness, and beyond suffering.”
-Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War [of the 500 in his North Vietnamese brigade who went to war in 1969, he was one of ten who survived the war]
Paul Fussell reflects that those who experience war can find a way to erase or repress certain memories so they can go on with their lives. However, the whole experience is not lost from our history. He calls it,
“innocence savaged and destroyed. Or if not destroyed, transformed utterly.”
-Paul Fussell from The Great War and Modern Memory