Search
Topics
Quotes
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Source: Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Context: We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author
The Callahan Chronicals <!-- [Sic] -->(1996) [originally published as Callahan and Company (1988)] "Backword", p. xii
Context: In a culture where pessimism has metastasized like slow carcinoma, that crazy Irishman was backward enough to try to raise hopes, like hothouse flowers. In an era during which even judicious use of alcohol has been increasingly bad-rapped, the man who came to be known as The Mick of Time was backward enough to think that the world can look just that essential tad better when seen through a flask, brightly. (As long as you let someone else drive you home afterward.) Above all, he — and his goofball customers — believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased.
Now he is gone. Gone back whence he came, and we are all the poorer for it. But I refuse to say that we will not see his like again. Or his love again.
“He has chosen not to heal me, but to hold me. The more intense the pain, the closer His embrace.”
Joni Eareckson Tada (1949) American artist
Source: A Place of Healing: Wrestling with the Mysteries of Suffering, Pain, and God's Sovereignty
“Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.”
Larry McMurtry (1936) American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter
Harry Belafonte (1927) American singer
Harry Belafonte and ‘The Long Road to Freedom’ YES! Magazine (2002) https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-american-now/harry-belafonte-and-the-long-road-to-freedom-20180828
Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer
Vyjayanthimala still cuts a striking figure tall
Bob Barr (1948) Republican and Libertarian politician
"Drug War Chronicle" (17 May 2002), as quoted in "Barr Booed for Anti-Pot Remarks in Home District Event" http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/237/barrbooed.shtml. <br class="br">2000s, 2002
Edmund Burke book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Part I Section XIV
Compare: Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, xv: "In the adversity of our best friends we always find something which is not wholly displeasing to us"
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
“It was glorious to see—if your heart were iron,
And you could keep from grieving at all the pain.”
Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist
Book XIII, lines 355–356
Translations, Iliad (1997)
