Quotes about strength
page 20

Ron Paul photo
Frederick William Faber photo

“Labour itself is but a sorrowful song,
The protest of the weak against the strong.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

The Sorrowful World.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Tanith Lee photo
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Haruki Murakami photo
William Paley photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Mahathir bin Mohamad photo

“I believe that the country should have a strong government but not too strong. A two-thirds majority like I enjoyed when I was prime minister is sufficient but a 90% majority is too strong.”

Mahathir bin Mohamad (1925) Prime Minister of Malaysia

December 2005, on his successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's Parliamentary majority of 92%. http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/12/11/nation/12838957&sec=nation

Timothy Geithner photo

“I believe deeply that it's very important to the United States, to the economic health of the United States, that we maintain a strong dollar.”

Timothy Geithner (1961) American central banker and politician

Meeting with Japanese reporters at the U.S. embassy, November 11, 2009 http://www.businessinsider.com/geithner-we-care-about-a-strong-dollar-really-2009-11

Nathanael Greene photo
Halle Berry photo

“I'm not obsessive, like I have to have the best butt or the best abs, but I like the idea of feeling strong and healthy. It's important to feel good about myself physically.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

The Star-Ledger staff (May 2, 2003) "It's a beautiful year, again, for this Oscar-winner", The Star-Ledger, p. 62.

“The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

"Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

Ernest Hemingway photo
Elizabeth Barrett Browning photo
George Raymond Richard Martin photo
Jane Roberts photo
Hans von Seeckt photo

“You know that my wishes go in the direction of a conciliation with Russia which opens up further possibilities and prepares them. Only we must not try to make Russia too strong.”

Hans von Seeckt (1866–1936) German general

Letter to von Winterfedlt-Menkin (19 July 1915), quoted in F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918 to 1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 105.

Philip José Farmer photo

“Strong blasphemers thrive only when strong believers thrive.”

Grandpa Winnegan
Riders of the Purple Wage (1967)

Wisława Szymborska photo

“God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Our Century's Decline"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)

Paul Mason (journalist) photo
Ralph Bunche photo
William Empson photo

“But as to risings, I can tell you why.
It is on contradiction that they grow.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
Up was the heartening and the strong reply
The heart of standing is we cannot fly.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

"Aubade", line 38; cited from John Haffenden (ed.) The Complete Poems (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 70.
The Complete Poems

Anastacia photo
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis photo
Leonid Brezhnev photo
Tommy Douglas photo
H. H. Asquith photo

“If I am asked what we are fighting for I reply in two sentences: In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation, an obligation which, if it had been entered into between private persons in the ordinary concerns of life, would have been regarded as an obligation not only of law but of honour, which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle which, in these days when force, material force, sometimes seems to be the dominant influence and factor in the development of mankind, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power. I do not believe any nation ever entered into a great controversy – and this is one of the greatest history will ever know – with a clearer conscience and a stronger conviction that it is fighting, not for aggression, not for the maintenance even of its own selfish interest, but that it is fighting in defence of principles the maintenance of which is vital to the civilisation of the world.”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the House of Commons on the declaration of war with Germany; see [Asquith, 6 August 1914, http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/asquithspeechtoparliament.htm, British Prime Minister's Address to Parliament]

Ayumi Hamasaki photo
Sun Myung Moon photo

“Elizabeth’s gaze roamed over the V of his shoulders, his strong arms, his black hair silvering at the temples. Yum.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 27

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Richard Salter Storrs photo

“To speak for Him will be our impulse. No matter how timid, nervous, self-diffident, we are in ourselves, as we touch His pierced and royal hand, we shall be instantly masterful and strong.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 561.

“Twenty years ago I had been invited to a seminar on Hurdles To Secularism… There were four or five Muslim participants present in that seminar…. They were invited to speak next. But they all smiled and said that they had nothing to add to what their ‘Hindu brethren’ had already said so ‘loudly and so lucidly’. And then all of a sudden I saw some fireworks from the same silent and satisfied Islamic fraternity. They had all stood up, shaking with uncontrollable rage, and were shouting at the same time, “He is lying!” They were pointing their fingers at the gentleman who had been invited to speak by the president, and who had said only a few sentences…. This was the late Hamid Dalwai. I had heard of him. But this was the first time I saw him. He was a tall man with a slight stoop, a smiling face, and a rather relaxed self-possession. He was saying, “All that has been said about Hindu communalism today is nothing new. We have heard it for the nth time. The intention of the working paper of this seminar, however, was to highlight for the first time what has so far been ignored by all progressive people who swear by secularism. What I want to expose today is Muslim communalism which has already divided the motherland, and which is still strong enough to poison our body-politic…”
It was at this point that the Muslim gentlemen had stood up and started shouting… All hell now broke loose as the Islamic fraternity stood up again, and started shouting that they had not come to the seminar to be insulted by “a hired hoodlum of the RSS fascists”. JP could restrain them no more, and declared the proceedings closed with a note of anguish in his voice.”

Hamid Dalwai (1932–1977) Indian social reformer, thinker and writer

About Hamid Dalwai at a seminar. Goel, S. R. (1994). Defence of Hindu society.
About

Harry Chapin photo
Muhammad photo
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan photo
Loretta Lynn photo

“She was my closest friend. She was the one person, other than my husband, I could turn to in a crisis. There was a lot of resentment when I first came to town. But Patsy was strong-willed and always taking up for me. If it hadn't been for her, I don't think I would have lasted.”

Loretta Lynn (1932) American country-music singer-songwriter

Country Weekly staff writer (2002). "Loretta Lynn" http://www.countryweekly.com/stories/stats/37299 CountryWeekly.com (accessded June 9, 2006)
On Patsy Cline

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Ignatius Sancho photo
Jane Roberts photo
Eugene J. Martin photo
Henry Adams photo
Freeman Dyson photo
Elon Musk photo

“I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

DK Smithsonian, Journey: An Illustrated History of Travel, ISBN 978-1-4654-6414-9 (Page 343).

John McCain photo

“What our enemies have sought to destroy is beyond their reach. It cannot be taken from us. It can only be surrendered.
My friends, we are again met on the field of political competition with our fellow countrymen. It is more than appropriate, it is necessary that even in times of crisis we have these contests, and engage in spirited disagreement over the shape and course of our government.
We have nothing to fear from each other. We are arguing over the means to better secure our freedom, and promote the general welfare. But it should remain an argument among friends who share an unshaken belief in our great cause, and in the goodness of each other.
We are Americans first, Americans last, Americans always. Let us argue our differences. But remember we are not enemies, but comrades in a war against a real enemy, and take courage from the knowledge that our military superiority is matched only by the superiority of our ideals, and our unconquerable love for them.
Our adversaries are weaker than us in arms and men, but weaker still in causes. They fight to express a hatred for all that is good in humanity.
We fight for love of freedom and justice, a love that is invincible. Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong.
Do not yield. Do not flinch. Stand up. Stand up with our President and fight.
We're Americans.
We're Americans, and we'll never surrender.
They will.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2004, Speech at the Republican National Convention (2004)

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Charles Taze Russell photo
John Ruskin photo
Grace Aguilar photo
Whitley Strieber photo
John Calvin photo
Jane Austen photo
Oliver Goldsmith photo
Malala Yousafzai photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Karen Blixen photo
Joaquin Miller photo
Jay Gould photo

“Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?… Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?… Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework… Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but `morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.”

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) British anthropologist

Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

Nico Perrone photo
Jane Roberts photo
Anaïs Nin photo

“I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Arnold Schwarzenegger photo

“28% of the greenhouse gasses come from eating meat and from raising cattle, so we can do a much better job. … Luckily we know that you can get your protein source from many different ways, you can get it through vegetables if you are a vegetarian. I have seen many body builders that are vegetarian and they get strong and healthy.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

" Arnold Schwarzenegger: Stop eating meat and save the planet http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/35038053/arnold-schwarzenegger-stop-eating-meat-and-save-the-planet", in BBC Newsbeat website (8 December 2015)
2010s

William Moulton Marston photo

“Women now fly heavy planes successfully; they help build planes, do mechanics' work. In England they've taken over a large share of all material labor in fields and factories; they've taken over police and home defence duties. In China a corps of 300,000 women under the supreme command of Madame Chiang Kai-shek perform the dangerous function of saving lives and repairing damage after Japanese air raids. This huge female strong- arm squad is officered efficiently by 3,000 women. Here in this country we've started a Women's Auxilary Army and Navy Corps that will do everything men soldiers and sailors do except the actual fighting. Prior to the First World War nobody believed that women could perform these feats of physical strength. But they're performing them now and thinking nothing of it. In this far worse: war, women will develop still greater female power; by the end of the war that traditional description the weaker sex" will be a joke-it will cease to have any meaning.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

As interviewed by Richard, Olive, "Our Women are Our Future": Sylvia Family Circle, (Aug 14, 1944) 14-17, 19 as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda", in Containing Wonder Woman: Fredric Wertham's Battle Against the Mighty Amazon by Craig This, p.32.

Aron Ra photo

“In their evolution, we see that the earliest pterosaurs were small, and yet still unnecessarily heavy and clumsy, both in the air and on the ground, but 160 million years of refinement has honed their abilities to the limit of incidental engineering. Despite their enormity, they were unbelievably lightweight; even the biggest ones were estimated at less than 500 lbs. They had hollow pneumatic bones of large diameter but only millimeters thick, making a strut-supported tubular frame that's surprisingly strong and highly resistant to the stresses of aeronautics. They also had extraordinarily powerful wing muscles, and this made them capable of vaulting airborne in a single bolt. Once in the air, muscle strands and tendons in the membrane of the wing itself worked with a network of pycnofibres to give them all the data they needed for subtle adjustments to the shape of the wing. The portions of the brain which were dedicated to flight, balance and visual gaze stabilization in birds are all larger and more adapted in pterosaurs. In fact, scientists are now convinced that these animals had such a mastery of flight, that the larger ones could even cross oceans, going 80 mph at 15,000 feet for thousands of miles on a single launch.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Pterosaurs are Terrible Lizards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_htQ8HJ1cA (December 3, 2013)

Robert Musil photo
John Sloan photo
Mahmud of Ghazni photo

“Mahmood having reached Tahnesur before the Hindoos had time to take measures for its defence, the city was plundered, the idols broken, and the idol Jugsom was sent to Ghizny to be trodden under foot…Mahmood having refreshed his troops, and understanding that at some distance stood the rich city of Mutra [Mathura], consecrated to Krishn-Vasdew, whom the Hindoos venerate as an emanation of God, directed his march thither and entering it with little opposition from the troops of the Raja of Delhy, to whom it belonged, gave it up to plunder. He broke down or burned all the idols, and amassed a vast quantity of gold and silver, of which the idols were mostly composed. He would have destroyed the temples also, but he found the labour would have been excessive; while some say that he was averted from his purpose by their admirable beauty. He certainly extravagantly extolled the magnificence of the buildings and city in a letter to the governor of Ghizny, in which the following passage occurs: "There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; most of them of marble, besides innumerable temples; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many millions of deenars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of two centuries."…The King tarried in Mutra 20 days; in which time the city suffered greatly from fire, beside the damage it sustained by being pillaged. At length he continued his march along the course of a stream on whose banks were seven strong fortifications, all of which fell in succession: there were also discovered some very ancient temples, which, according to the Hindoos, had existed for 4000 years. Having sacked these temples and forts, the troops were led against the fort of Munj…The King, on his return, ordered a magnificent mosque to be built of marble and granite, of such beauty as struck every beholder with astonishment, and furnished it with rich carpets, and with candelabras and other ornaments of silver and gold. This mosque was universally known by the name of the Celestial Bride. In its neighbourhood the King founded an university, supplied with a vast collection of curious books in various languages. It contained also a museum of natural curiosities. For the maintenance of this establishment he appropriated a large sum of money, besides a sufficient fund for the maintenance of the students, and proper persons to instruct youth in the arts and sciences…The King, in the year AH 410 (AD 1019), caused an account of his exploits to be written and sent to the Caliph, who ordered it to be read to the people of Bagdad, making a great festival upon the occasion, expressive of his joy at the propagation of the faith.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, pp. 27-37.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Hope Solo photo

“I got blasted with a ball to the face at practice. It doesn't hurt as much as you'd think – not if you're strong and keep your face in it. It only hurts if you pull away.”

Hope Solo (1981) American association football player

As quoted in "Hope Solo: Domestic Violence Drama Has Been 'Traumatic and Embarrassing'" http://www.people.com/article/hope-solo-calls-domestic-violence-drama-traumatic-people-interview, People.com (June 17, 2015)
2010s

Magda Goebbels photo
Bruce Springsteen photo

“I've seen strong hearts give way
To the burdens of the day,
To the weary hands of time
Where fortune is not kind.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"My Lucky Day"
Song lyrics, Working on a Dream (2009)

Ben Bernanke photo
John Ogilby photo

“Though Strong, Resist not a too Potent Foe;
Madmen against a violent Torrent row.
Thou mayst hereafter serve the Common-weal;
Then yield till Time shall later Acts repeal.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Fab. LXVII: Of the Oke and the Reed, Moral
The Fables of Aesop (2nd ed. 1668)

Yukio Mishima photo

“As he saw it, there was only one choice — to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.”

"Sword" ("Ken"), quoted in 三島由紀夫短編集: Seven Stories, translated by John Bester (2002), p. 46.

Bethany Kennedy Scanlon photo
Evelyn Waugh photo
Derren Brown photo
Josh Billings photo
James Jeffrey Roche photo

“The net of law is spread so wide,
No sinner from its sweep may hide.
Its meshes are so fine and strong
They take in every child of wrong.
O wondrous web of mystery!
Big fish alone escape from thee!”

James Jeffrey Roche (1847–1908) American journalist

"The Net Of Law", The V-A-S-E & Other Bric-a-Brac (published by Richard G. Badger Company, Boston, 1900)

Georges Clemenceau photo

“I have come to the conclusion that force is right. Why is this chicken here? (pointing to his plate). Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

Quoted in Frances Stevenson's diary entry (12 December 1919), A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A Diary (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 192.
Prime Minister

Garry Kasparov photo
Heidi Klum photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Thomas Frank photo
Vitruvius photo
Karen Kwiatkowski photo

“I came to share with many NSA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry. What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon.”

Karen Kwiatkowski (1960) retired military officer and author

" In Rumsfeld's Shop http://www.amconmag.com/12_1_03/feature.html", The American Conservative, 1 December 2003.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad photo
Prem Rawat photo