Quotes about horde (72 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“[Hindustan] is a wonderful country. Compared with our countries it is a different world; its mountains, rivers, jungles and deserts, its towns, its cultivated lands, its animals and plants, its peoples and their tongues, its rains, and its winds, are all different. …Once the water of Sind is crossed, everything is in the Hindustan way, land, water, tree, rock, people and horde, opinion and custom.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

People , World , Way , Mountain

“I care not what religion, club, area or class you come from, nor what bit of colored cloth you wave as a flag. WE are ALL under deadly attack by colored hordes which outnumber us more than seven to one, led by a filthy Jewish, Communist conspiracy!”

George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) American politician, founder of the American Nazi Party

White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy
1962, White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy

Religion , Color , Clothes

“It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins.”

V.S. Naipaul book An Area of Darkness

An Area of Darkness (1964)

Death , History , Reading , Success

“Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, commanders and political instructors, men and women guerrillas! The whole world is looking to you as a force capable of destroying the brigand hordes of German invaders. The enslaved peoples of Europe under the yoke of the German invaders are looking to you as their liberators. A great mission of liberation has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission! The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Speech on the 24th Anniversary of the Revolution
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews

Women , Men , War , People

“During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch—the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. … There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Bible Teaching and Religious Practice http://books.google.com/books?id=sujuHO_fvJgC&pg=PA568&dq=twain+%22Bible+Teaching+and+Religious+Practice%22&cd=1#v=onepage&q=twain%20%22Bible%20Teaching%20and%20Religious%20Practice%22&f=false.
"Bible Teaching and Religious Practice" (1923)

Death , Books , Age , World

“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one — on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful — as usual — will shout for the war. The pulpit will — warily and cautiously — object — at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers — as earlier — but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation — pulpit and all — will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”

Mark Twain book The Mysterious Stranger

originally in The Chronicle of Satan (1905).
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

Men , God , War , Secret

“The upshot of her tirade was that I was the devil's spawn and should be locked up in a tower before I unleashed hordes of the living dead to slaughter them all in their sleep. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but not by much.”

Kelley Armstrong The Reckoning

Source: The Reckoning

Sleep , Dead

“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until…”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Source: The Return

Death , Box

“First, the candy and flowers, then the apology letters, then the ravenous demon hordes. In that order." -Jace Wayland”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Variant: It wouldn't be my move," Jace agreed. "First the candy and flowers, then the apology letters, then the ravenous demon hordes. In that order.
Source: City of Bones

Flowers

“So you're the infamous Acheron. (Amanda)
Lord and Master of the great barbarian horde that roams the night. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Night Pleasures

Source: Night Pleasures

Night

“I wouldn't be able to do anything with my vampire horde except make it run around in a herd, but it would be a very impressive herd.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Slays

“One doesn’t let her fiancé fight a horde of ghouls by himself. Some things were just not done.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Shifts

Fight

“Aghast, Yasmeen gaped at her before looking to the duke. "It's worse than I thought. Not just the Horde, not just the police- you're keeping company with someone who has principles.”

Meljean Brook (1977)

Source: The Iron Duke

“Caliph Vathek and his dark horde
Are bound for Hell, you won’t be bored!
Your faith in me will be restored—
Unless this token you find untoward
And my poor gift you have ignored.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Faith , Hell

“As if we’d have sex in a cave surrounded by hordes of demons. This is reality, not your fevered imagination.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Sex , Imagination , Reality

“Society is now one polish'd horde, Form'd of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

“Why – even supposing I had the skill – do you bid me compose a song dedicated to Venus the lover of Fescennine mirth, placed as I am among long-haired hordes, having to endure German speech, praising oft with wry face the song of the gluttonous Burgundian who spreads rancid butter on his hair?”
Quid me, etsi valeam, parare carmen Fescenninicolae iubes Diones inter crinigeras situm catervas et Germanica verba sustinentem, laudantem tetrico subinde vultu quod Burgundio cantat esculentus infundens acido comam butyro?

Sidonius Apollinaris book Carmina

Quid me, etsi valeam, parare carmen
Fescenninicolae iubes Diones
inter crinigeras situm catervas
et Germanica verba sustinentem,
laudantem tetrico subinde vultu
quod Burgundio cantat esculentus
infundens acido comam butyro?
Carmen 12, line 1; vol. 1, p. 213.
Carmina

Lovers

“This is the archetypal suburban-conservative nightmare — anonymous hordes of leftist boat-rockers viciously assaulting the champion of the decent people, who is just a really nice guy given to tending his lawn and minding his own business. Being "nice" is a central part of the Brooks yuppie's guilt-proofing self-image rationale; so long as you're the kind of guy who lets people merge on highways, stands politely in line at Starbucks, doesn't put garish Christmas decorations on his lawn and pays his taxes, you're not really doing anything wrong. It gets a little tiring after a while, hearing people who vote for wars tell you how nice they are.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

"David Brooks and the DLC: Best Friends Forever?", AlterNet (3 August 2006)

War , People , Guy , Business

“What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows: American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U. S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Money , Family , Reality , Reading

“There was a cable-TV program that documented how Peeps are made, and it showed unlimited hordes of Peeps bouncing merrily down a conveyor belt, right toward the camera. I came.”

Paul Rudnick book I Shudder

Source: I Shudder (2009), p. 106

“During his lifetime Gurdjieff did not publish any books on the techniques of his teaching, and his pupils were bound to secrecy on the subject. Since his death in Paris in 1949, however, many of his works have been published, and there has been a flood of memoirs by disciples and admirers. Gurdjieff was in almost ever respect the antithesis of Aleister Crowley. Whereas Crowley craved publicity, Gurdjieff shunned it. Crowley was forgotten for two decades after his death; Gurdjieff on the contrary, has become steadily better known, and his influence continues to grow. One of the main reasons for this is that there was so little of the charlatan about him. He is no cult figure with hordes of gullible disciples. What he has to teach makes an appeal to the intelligence, and can be fully understood only by those who are prepared to make a serious effort.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

They Had Strange Powers (1975)

Death , Books , Intelligence , Effort

“O'er the fields of space together following her flying traces,
In a radiant tumult thronging, suns and stars and myriad races
Mount the spirit spires of beauty, reaching onward to the day
When the Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes away
Through the glimmering deeps to silence, and within the awful fold
Life and joy and love forever vanish as a tale is told,
Lost within the mother's being. So the vision flamed and fled,
And before the glory fallen every other dream lay dead.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Love , Life , Age , Beauty

“Improving the opportunities across the board is extremely important to sustain the legitimacy of wealth. If a whole horde of people, whole sections of society don't feel they have the opportunities, then the focus is going to be on those who have it and who have made it and say that is illegitimate.”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

On the rising suspicions towards self-made people after the Panama Papers leak, as quoted in " ‘Panama Papers’ furore: RBI Guv Raghuram Rajan says ‘dangerous’ to question legitimacy of self-made wealth http://www.financialexpress.com/article/economy/panama-papers-furore-rbi-guv-raghuram-rajan-says-dangerous-to-question-legitimacy-of-self-made-wealth/233785/", The Financial Express (7 April 2016)

People , Feeling , Wealth

“The ancient usual retreat
Takes down the steps the scattering horde;
Adam again has met defeat,
Has missed connections with the Lord. But where the altar-candles die
Waits God, and in a corner prays
The last of heroes who will try
The Gate again in seven days.”

Josephine Jacobsen (1908–2003) American-Canadian poet

"Non Sum Dignus" st. 4–5, In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems, 1995, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0801851165

God , Waiting

“I could not define how I entered into the struggle. Probably like a man who, walking the street, with his preoccupations, his needs and his own thoughts, surprised by the fire which is consuming a house, takes off his jacket and rushes to give help to those who are the prey of flames. With the common sense of a young man of twenty or so, this is the only thing I understood in all I was seeing : that we were losing the Fatherland, that we would no longer have the Fatherland, that, with the unwitting support of the miserable, impoverished and exploited Romanian workers, the Jewish horde would sweep us away.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

Support , Sense , Help , Housing

“The Cymry will be lamenting
While their souls will be tried
Before a horde of ravagers.
The Cymry, chief wicked ones,
On account of the loss of holy wafers.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The First Address of Taliesin

Soul , Loss

“Doctor Doom: Bereft of my technology… mystic armor damaged… offensive and defensive capabilities minimal. Enemy forces… [a horde of demons closes in] substantial. It matters not. Even cornered, to my last breath I remain who and what I am. I will not hide, nor tremble, nor beg. Let them come and reckon with fury that is DOOM defiant. Here I stand, hell-horde! Unbowed! But understand: If it is my destiny that I should perish this day, I shall not go down easily… and I shall NOT go down ALONE.
Demons: RIP its SKIN. Wear it for HIDE. Its EYES for me. Tear its FLESH from its BONES.
Doctor Doom: Yes, come, and let us make an end of it — there is DOOM enough for ALL!”

J. Michael Straczynski (1954) American writer and television producer

June
2006
J. Michael Straczynski
The Hammer Falls (Part 2)
Fantastic Four
537

Hell , Understanding , Tear

“The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the several thousand mammals in today's global ecosystem. However, turtles have scored quite an impressive ecological triumph in one very important role, that of freshwater predator-omnivore… All through the Temperate Zone, otters delight the naturalist and the lay public. But how many other freshwater, semi-aquatic mammal predators can you name? Mink, of course. Relatives of otters on one hand, land weasels on the other, mink do hunt in streams. How many others? If you caught the excellent BBC series "Life on Earth", you saw footage of the swimming shrew, the Desman of the Pyrenees, a molelike furball that dives for aquatic worms and other freshwater small fry. Our own New England star-nosed mole goes hunting in water, using its starburst-shaped snout tip to feel out wriggling prey. Andean streams flowing through Preu are host to the fish-spearing mouse, Ichthyomys, that impales prey on its projecting front teeth. But if we go to a tropical lake or sluggish river, is it full of otters, mink, and paddling shrews? No, it is full of turtles.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 57
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Feeling , Star , Fish

“The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem…. The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: ‘Who shall be in charge of telling the story.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

Thinking

“I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.”

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 2, “Experiment” (p. 22)

“p>One translucent day I leave the city
to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning,
ancient temples ruined by time,
streams that creep alone through the dark
past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests
where long processions, lost souls of Champa,
march; and evening spills through thick,
fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies
were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls.
Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred
to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest
in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward,
their light chatter floating
with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces,
temples that blaze in cerulean skies.
Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder
of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli,
the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh
as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced,
their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago
and still I am obsessed,
my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow
for the race of Champa.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"On the Way Home", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 167; quoted in full in Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam by Thich Thien-an (Tuttle Publishing, 1992)

Men , Dreams , Way , Home

“Since when has America with all its hordes of gangsters and beggars become God's Kingdom?”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

the heckler at Brennugjá
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

God

“By dissolving nationalities, the liberal economic system had done its best to universalise enmity, to transform mankind into a horde of ravenous beasts (for what else are competitors?) who devour one another just because each has identical interests with all the others – after this preparatory[work there remained but one step to take before the goal was reached, the dissolution of the family. To accomplish this, economy’s own beautiful invention, the factory system, came to its aid.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Nachdem die liberale Ökonomie ihr Bestes getan hatte, um durch die Auflösung der Nationalitäten die Feindschaft zu verallgemeinern, die Menschheit in eine Horde reißender Tiere - und was sind Konkurrenten anders?
zu verwandeln, die einander ebendeshalb auffressen, WEIL jeder mit allen andern gleiches Interesse hat, nach dieser Vorarbeit blieb ihr nur noch ein Schritt zum Ziele übrig, die Auflösung der Familie. Um diese durchzusetzen, kam ihr eine eigene schöne Erfindung, das Fabriksystem, zu Hülfe.
Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844)

Family , Beauty

“What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 367 et seq.

Mountain , Maternity

“The most significant feature of our histories, however, is the religious zeal felt or exhibited by the swordsmen of Islam before and after the “infidels” who resisted “were sent to hell”, the Brahmans massacred or molested or expelled, idols desecrated, temples demolished, and mosques raised in their stead. The prophet of Islam appears in a dream and bids a sultãn to start on the “holy expedition”, leaving no doubt that the “victory of religion” was assured. Amîr Khusrû was very eloquent about the transformation that was taking place. When the hordes of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî sacked the temple of Somnath, he exulted, “The sword of Islãm purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.” His enthusiasm broke all bounds when the same hordes swept over South India: “The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islãm, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustãn by the illumination of its guidance… and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus in which Satanism had prevailed since the time of Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultãn’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first expedition to Deogîr, so that the flames of the fight of the law illumine all these unholy countries… God be praised!” One wonders whether the poet of Islam is being honoured or slandered when he is presented in our own times as the pioneer of Secularism. Or, perhaps, Secularism in India has a meaning deeper than that we find in the dictionaries or dissertations on political science. We may not be much mistaken if, seeing its studied exercise in blackening everything Hindu and whitewashing everything Islamic, we suspect that this Secularism is nothing more than the good old doctrine of Islam in disguise.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

God , Religion , Law , Dreams

“I can’t really imagine war. I can imagine having to fight some swarm of zombie machines or snarling horde of posthuman fast-burn wreckage or whatever, but not two or more actual human societies actually fighting each other. I’m aware that people did that, before history, before the Moon, but it seems irrational. One side would have to believe they had something to gain from destroying or damaging the other, which just doesn’t make sense: it runs up against the law of association. And more to the point, each individual on any side would have to believe that they benefited from participating even if they died, which doesn’t make sense either. I suppose kin selection could make genes prevalent that made people vulnerable to that kind of illusion, but that only makes sense with animals that don’t have foresight. Even crows aren’t that stupid, at least not the ones that can talk. You have to get down to ants and such like before you see that kind of genetic mechanical mindlessness.”

Ken MacLeod book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 9 “Red Sun Circle” (pp. 134-135)

War , People , Stupidity , Law

“I have myself seen the depredations of the Afghans round Dehli and Mattra. God defend us from them! It makes the very hair of the body stand on end to think of them. Two hundred thousand men were destroyed in these massacres, and the hordes of the enemy were without number. Such atrocities, forsooth, were perpetrated in compliance with their religion and law! What cared they for the religion, the law, the honour and reputation of the innocent sufferers? It was enough for such bigots that splendour accrued by their deeds to the faith of Muhammad and 'Ali!”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

MuntakhAb-ut-TawArIkh, translated in Elliot and Dowson, The [[History of India as told by its own Historians]], Volume VIII, pp. 405-06.

Men , God , Faith , Religion

“Had Kala lived, Tarzan would have sacrificed all else to remain near her, but now that she was dead, and the playful friends of his childhood grown into fierce and surly brutes he felt that he much preferred the peace and solitude of his cabin to the irksome duties of leadership amongst a horde of wild beasts.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

Peace , Solitude , Childhood , Dead

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

Death , Men , Dreams , Color

“For Alfred seide a wis word,
euch mon hit schulde legge on hord:
"3ef thu isihst er he beo icume,
his strencþe is him wel neh binume."”

Alfred the Great (849–899) King of Wessex

On this, hear Alfred's weighty word Which man should treasure once it's heard: "Foresee your trouble in its course: You thereby take away its force."
The Owl and the Nightingale, line 1223; as translated by Brian Stone in The Owl and the Nightingale, Cleanness, St. Erkenwald (1971), p. 224.
Misattributed

“The hordes of words that fill our books proclaim our ignorance, reveal the obscurities that flood our knowledge. If we were perfectly enlightened, our moral books would contain only maxims and our books on physics and spirituality would contain only axioms and facts. Everything else is clutter and shows no more than our gropings, our efforts, and our difficulties.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Books , Knowledge , Effort

“Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. "I have never belonged to this race," said Rimbaud.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"On Shooting at Elephants" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001211/leonard, The Nation (27 November 2000)

Love , War , World , Dreams

“They belonged to that futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and the dark damnation of man's soul can magically be healed if only they eat bran for breakfast.”

Thomas Wolfe book Of Time and the River

Of Time and the River (1935)

Soul

“The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord
That all the misbelieving and black Horde
Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Fear , Soul

“A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Introduction
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Death , Men , Mountain , Parent

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life , Death , World , Change

“An infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia; a Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slew the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroyed the health and even the souls of nations.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Aftermath, by Winston Churchill (published 1929), p. 274
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men , Health , Soul

“Despite the Internet's origin in the late 1960s as a government sponsored means of communication between the Department of Defense, private industry, and academia, it has been at its best — and generated the greatest economic, social, and technological benefits — since it was 'liberated' by the hordes of 'geeks' who were originally hired to run it by employers who were not themselves conversant with computers, and couldn't tell when their employees were exchanging official traffic or trading dirty jokes and recipes for marijuana brownies.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Keep Your Filthy Hands Off The Internet" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle575-20100620-02.html 20 June 2010.

Communication , Marijuana

“This moment of brotherhood in the same faith and of pledging to fight for our Christian country against the cheating Judaic hordes, will never be forgotten. We who were fighting each other but yesterday, were now embracing. The orientation guidelines in our (student) meetings were the writings of our national geniuses Bogdan Petriceicu Hajdeu, Vasile Conta, Mihail Eminescu, Vasile Alecsandri, etc. but especially the writings and lectures of Professor Cuza, the writings of Professor Paulescu, the lessons in national education of Professor Gavanescul.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

See the sections on A.C. Cuza and Nicolae Paulescu.
For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

Education , Faith , Fight , Cheating

“Rama Rama Rama Rama Sita Rama you chant
Do with devotion, and get the release you want…
As those Yama hordes arrive, to bid you to come
Spirit tries to escape the throat, Hari’s name will not come
Body systems cease working and our relative are bemoaning
Name of the Ocean-daughter’s lord will it come to your asking?
When your breath is blocked by phlegm in your throat
Vasudev Krishna’s name will be of no use then to shout
When you beautiful body breaks down and falls apart
As your eyes get blurred and dead, Ranga’s name will not depart
When your body juices mix up and collect down below
As the elements disintegrate, uttering God’s name will it allow.
Having born as a wicked and done many a cruel deed
As soul departs, Puranadara Vittala’s name will not proceed.”

Purandara Dasa (1484–1564) Music composer

Here Dasa explains the agony of the last stages of death and advices taking the name of god at the time, as quoted here.[Narayan, M.K.V., Lyrical Musings on Indic Culture: A Sociology Study of Songs of Sant Purandara Dasa, http://books.google.com/books?id=-r7AxJp6NOYC&pg=PA79, 1 January 2010, Readworthy, 978-93-80009-31-5, 81-82]

God , Beauty , Soul , Daughters

“It was unbelievable! My family and close friends were sitting together till quite late in the night. People outside the gate just kept standing, hordes and hordes of them. It was overwhelming. I kept going out to meet them at half-hour intervals. But it just wasn't enough.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

People , Family , Night

“Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma

Success

“I do know enough about economics — and so do you — to understand that the 'stimulus program' of Barack Obama and his ravenous parasitic hordes, supposedly designed to 'repair' America's broken economy, reveals him to be unimaginably stupid, gibberingly insane, or simply the biggest, most barefaced criminal thug ever to occupy the White House.
And that's saying a lot.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"A Little Austrian Flea," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle508-20090301-04.html 1 March 2009.

Stupidity , Understanding , Housing

“We planted our crops in the spring, and they came up, and were looking nicely, and we were cheered with the hopes of having a very abundant harvest. But alas! it very soon appeared as if our crops were going to be swallowed up by a vast horde of crickets, that came down from these mountains-crickets very different to what I used to be acquainted with in the State of New York. They were crickets nearly as large as a man's thumb. They came in immense droves, so that men and women with brush could make no headway against them; but we cried unto the Lord in our afflictions, and the Lord heard us, and sent thousands and tens of thousands of a small white bird. I have not seen any of them lately. Many called them gulls, although they were different from the seagulls that live on the Atlantic coast. And what did they do for us? They went to work, and by thousands and tens of thousands, began to devour them up, and still we thought that even they could not prevail against so large and mighty an army. But we noticed, that when they had apparently filled themselves with these crickets, they would go and vomit them up, and again go to work and fill themselves, and so they continued to do, until the land was cleared of crickets, and our crops were saved. There are those who will say that this was one of the natural courses of events, that there was no miracle in it. Let that be as it may, we esteemed it as a blessing from the hand of God; miracle or no miracle, we believe that God had a hand in it, and it does not matter particularly whether strangers believe or not.”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 21:276-277 (June 20,1880)
Pratt describes the event in which seagulls disposed of swarms of crickets that were destroying their crops.
Miracle of the seagulls and crickets

Women , Men , God , Hope

“Keith has one of those all terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand -cylinder engine to drive over those hordes of blood-thirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Obviously

World , Game

“… you speak of Venarium familiarly. Perhaps you were there?"
"I was," grunted [Conan]. "I was one of the horde that swarmed over the hills. I hadn't yet seen fifteen snows, but already my name was repeated about the council fires.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Beyond the Black River" (1935)

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Men , War , Faith , Way

“However, the only way these arguments acquire any purchase is in the context of an international, read western, commitment to Jewish supremacy, wherein Jews are seen as white Europeans defending white European values and civilization against the primitive Arab hordes.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Way , Reading

“Listen, don't look so depressed, old fellow. This is what all of Heine's poems are like, it's only peasants who don't laugh at them; or rather, perhaps, Calvinists. Abroad, it's the normal practice that if someone is looking really sad in the street, a horde of fat men comes running over waving checkbooks and hire him for a circus; they teach people like that to ride a bicycle that disintegrates when they try to mount it, or else make them play a stringless fiddle with a broomstick.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Garðar Hólm
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Sadness , People , Men

“These are points to consider when we put our house in order for the advancing hordes of aliens. Experience has taught us to have faith in the bulk of our people. The great decisions in American history have always been right. The heart of the nation is sound and must be kept sound. It is a characteristic of ours that we are ashamed not to be right. I believe that our present concern about immigration is a fear that we will not be able to protect ourselves and at the same time discharge our obligations.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

People , Fear , Faith , History

“Camel caravans bear
witness guns to Caesar.
Hordes crawl and seep inside
the walls. The streets
flow stone. Life goes
on absorbing war. Violence
kills the temple of no sex.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The New Creatures

Life , War , Sex

“Beware the power of the pajama-clad, Cheeto-eating, twitter, blogging hordes. We are legion!”

Rachel Maddow (1973) American journalist

The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC (May 4, 2009)

“Not the number of noses, but the magnitude of interests, should furnish the elements by which the proportion of representation should be computed…The classes that represent civilisation, the holders of accumulated capital and accumulated thought have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them nor stake in the Commonwealth to control them.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: 'English Politics and Parties', Bentley's Quarterly Review, 1, (1859), pp. 28-29

Knowledge

“The world is desperately imperfect. Even if a quarter of the working people were engrossed in new thoughts and inventions and lived off the others, humanity would still gain tremendously thanks to the constant stream of inventions and intellectual work emerging from this horde of people striving upward.”

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory

from Гений среди людей ("The Genius of the People") -- a manuscript written in 1918

People , World

“For five thousand infantry would now cross the Kaitna at a place where men said the river was uncrossable, then fight an enemy horde at least ten times their number. […] The enemy had stolen a march, the redcoats had journeyed all night and were bone tired, but Wellesley would have his battle.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 197
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Triumph (1997)

Men , Time , Fight , Night

“It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for — or ignored.”

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) American Modernist writer, poet and artist

What Do You See, Madam? (1932)
Context: If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.
It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for — or ignored.

Love