“Ideas are more important than battles.”
As quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me https://books.google.com/books?id=5m23RrMeLt4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22lies+my+teacher+told+me%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAGoVChMIgsHjgsrpxwIVBpANCh3kRgDA#v=snippet&q=even%20canada&f=false, by James W. Loewen
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Charles Sumner 16
American abolitionist and politician 1811–1874Related quotes
Cited (earlier) in: American Women Composers (1979) AWC news. Volumes 2-3. p. 41
Beauty is Revolution (1980)
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.
“They are more than men at the outset of their battles; at the end they are less than the women.”
Book X, sec. 28
History of Rome
“Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.”
The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)
Grady Hendrix in "'Battle,' 'Games': Cold Brutality A Common Theme" https://www.npr.org/2012/03/21/148991013/battle-games-cold-brutality-a-common-theme by Nedia Ulaby, All Things Considered, NPR, March 21, 2012
The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008), About The Hunger Games
“The battle, if you could call it that, lasted no more than a few seconds.”
Source: The Icebound Land
“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”
This quote is widely attributed to Margaret Thatcher on various websites, and also appears in a number of books, including The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Columbia University Press (1989), ed. Robert Andrews, p. 320 : ISBN 0231069901. 9780231069908 , but without any further source information such as date, location or any other context.
One valid Thatcher quote which may be the basis for the version above appears in the Second Carlton Lecture http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105799 (‘Why Democracy Will Last’), delivered at the Carlton Club, London (November 26, 1984) : Mr. Chairman, each generation has to stand up for democracy. It can’t take anything for granted and may have to fight fundamental battles anew. You know that marvellous quotation from Goethe : ‘That which thy fathers bequeathed thee / Earn it anew if thou would possess it.’
Thatcher also expressed this thought in a Speech to Atlantic Bridge (May 14, 2003) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111266, delivered at the St. Regis Hotel, New York City : My friends, every generation has to fight anew the battle for liberty.
Disputed
“Entertainment is all right, but entertainment with an idea behind it is much more important.”
On exposing antisemitism in Gentleman's Agreement. Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life by Lynn Haney (2003). page 148. ISBN 0786714735.