“Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity
Our reason coexists with our insanity
And though we choose between reality and madness
It's either sadness or euphoria.”

—  Billy Joel

Summer, Highland Falls.
Song lyrics, Turnstiles (1976)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between real…" by Billy Joel?
Billy Joel photo
Billy Joel 103
American singer-songwriter and pianist 1949

Related quotes

Helen Keller photo

“Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.…”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Letter published in the Manchester Advertiser (3 March 1911), quoted in A People's History of the United States (1980) page 345.
Context: Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

Stendhal photo

“In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Dans notre état, il faut opter; il s'agit de faire fortune dans ce monde ou dans l'autre, il n'y a pas de milieu.
Vol. I, ch. VIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Ben Carson photo

“If we recognize our talents and use them appropriately, and choose a field that uses those talents, we will rise to the top of our field.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon
Pierre Joseph Proudhon photo

“Up to now the victories of justice over injustice and of equality over inequality have been won by instinct and the simple force of things, but the final triumph of our social nature will be due to our reason, or else we shall fall back into feudal chaos. Either this is reserved for our intelligence, or this depth of poverty for our indignity.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

What is Property? (1840)

Jacques Delille photo

“Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.”

Jacques Delille (1738–1813) French poet and translator

Le sort fait les parents, le choix fait les amis.
Malheur at Pitié (1803), canto I.

Andrew Solomon photo

“Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement distractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and long for what may be life's most profound compliment: their choosing to live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Source: Far from the Tree, Ch. 1 Son, p 1-2.

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)

Francois Villon photo

“Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.”

Francois Villon (1431–1463) Mediæval French poet

Algernon Charles Swinburne "A Ballad of Francois Villon, Prince of all Ballad-Makers" (1878), line 10.
Criticism

Algernon Charles Swinburne photo

“Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne book Poems and Ballads

"A Ballad of Francois Villon", lines 10, 20 and 30.
Poems and Ballads (1866-89)

Dag Hammarskjöld photo

“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

Related topics