The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s
Context: Nobody is to be blamed for being born a slave; but a slave who not only eschews a striving for freedom but justifies and eulogies his slavery (e. g., calls the throttling of Poland and the Ukraine, etc., a "defense of the fatherland" of the Great Russians") - such a slave is a lickspittle and a boor, who arouses a legitimate feeling of indignation, contempt, and loathing.
Quotes about nobody
page 4
Parnassus on Wheels (1917)
Context: "Lord!" he said, "when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night — there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by — just waiting for my stuff. And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation — yes, ma'am, salvation for their little, stunted minds — and it's hard to make 'em see it. That's what makes it worth while — I'm doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It's a new field, but by the bones of Whitman, it's worth while. That's what this country needs — more books!"
Sat Chit Anand
Context: Nobody can teach you love. Love you have to find yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love. You are not obliging the person, you are not even wanting anything in return, not even gratitude. On the contrary, you are grateful that the person has allowed you to do something for him. It was your joy, sheer joy. Love knows nothing of responsibility. It does many things, it is very creative; it shares all that it has, but it is not a responsibility, remember. Responsibility is an ugly word in comparison to love. Love is natural. Responsibility is created by the cunning priests, politicians who want to dominate you in the name of God, in the name of the nation, in the name of family, in the name of religion -- any fiction will do. But they don't talk about love. On the contrary, they are all against love, because love is unable to be controlled by them. A man of love acts out of his own heart, not according to any moral code. A man of love will not join the army because it is his responsibility to fight for his nation. A man of love will say there are no nations, and there is no question of any fight.
Persecution
One Minute Wisdom (1989)
Context: A disciple was one day recalling how Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed were branded as rebels and heretics by their contemporaries.
Said the Master, Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy.
“Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”
All the Trouble in the World (1994)
As quoted in Wilhelm von Humboldt (1970), by P. Berglar, p. 87, and "Profiles of Educators: Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835)" by Karl-Heinz Günther, in Prospects, Vol. 18, Issue 1 (March 1988)
Context: There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.
The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)
"Is There a God?" http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/isThereGod.htm (1952), commissioned by Illustrated Magazine but not published until its appearance in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943-68, ed. John G. Slater and Peter Köllner (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 543-48
1950s
Context: Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
2016, DNC Address (July 2016)
Context: You know, nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office. You can read about it. You can study it. But until you’ve sat at that desk, you don’t know what it’s like to manage a global crisis, or send young people to war. But Hillary has been in the room; she’s been part of those decisions. She knows what’s at stake in the decisions our government makes — what’s at stake for the working family, for the senior citizen, or the small business owner, for the soldier, for the veteran. And even in the midst of crisis, she listens to people, and she keeps her cool, and she treats everybody with respect. And no matter how daunting the odds, no matter how much people try to knock her down, she never, ever quits.
That is the Hillary I know. That’s the Hillary I’ve come to admire. And that’s why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman — not me, not Bill, nobody — more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. I : The Craft
Context: I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.
“Be nice to people, because nobody likes an asshole. ”
“Nobody was ever killed except outlaws, and the community is better off without them.”
Source: Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic (2000), p. 13
The much less verbose true quote, from Begin's "acerbic" visit to the US Congress in 1982 (during the Lebanon War), as found in Time Magazine's contemporary report http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,925497-6,00.html (George J. Church, July 05, 1982):
"Don't threaten us with cutting off aid to give up our principles!"
"Sir, do not threaten us with cutting aid. First of all, you should know that this is not a one-way street. You help us, and we are very grateful for your help; but this is a two-way street: We do a lot for you. And also in recent battles we did a lot for the United States; and I gave some examples, but this is not the place to go into them. Therefore, do not threaten us with cuts in aid, but take note: That if at any time you demand of us to yield on a principle in which we believe, while threatening to cut aid, we will not abandon the principle in which we believe - and propose cutting aid. The argument went approximately thus."
On the other hand, contemporary reports give the true quote as also being far less verbose.
Source: attributed as alleged reply to Senator Joe Biden in Ronn Torossian's op-ed "Menachem Begin To Joe Biden: I Am Not A Jew With Trembling Knees" https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/menachem-begin-to-joe-biden-i-am-not-a-jew-with-trembling-knees/2015/04/03, in 2015 without source. Possibly of earlier origin.
Source: As found in Time Magazine's contemporary report http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,925497-6,00.html
Jean-Louis Murat, 2004 http://www.theguardian.com/football/2004/apr/04/sport.features
Attributed in George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire.
Attributed
“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,' Jacques said. And then: 'I wonder why.”
I have thought about Jacques' question since. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road - and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright - and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or.
Pt. 1, Ch. 2 - p.22
Giovanni's Room (1956)
“Down there we know, the streets we know, but up here? Nobody's been here.”
—TFI a French channel http://youtube.com/watch?v=cBapQdXxGKg
Genius is a form of madness and we're all that way. But I used to be coy about it, like me guitar playing. But if there's such a thing as genius — I am one. And if there isn't, I don't care.
John Lennon interview with Rolling Stone magazine (December 1970)
Nobody else did that. So I don't wanna hear shit about nobody telling me who I can't love and respect until you start doing what they did. To me, this is Mecca. This is the black family. You know what I'm saying? But, what makes it that much sadder, what makes me wanna cry, is that when I leave this place, so does Mecca. You understand what I'm saying? We're going back to the real deal. Right out there, you're going see the same sisters and Brenda, they're right out there, and y'all are going to get in your cars and drive the fuck home.
1990s, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Atlanta (1992)
To the good God, nothing is little because He is so great and we so small- that is why He stoops down and takes the trouble to make those little things for us- to give us a chance to prove our love for Him.
Source: Knoansw, A Simple Path Quotes – The Inspiring Book Of Mother Teresa, September 03, 2020 https://knoansw.com/a-simple-path-quotes-mother-teresa/
2014, Statement on Cuban policy (December 2014)
When receiving the Nobel peace price in 1979. As quoted from Hitchens, C. (2012). The missionary position: Mother Theresa in theory and practice.
Source: Fathers and mothers are so busy they have no time. Young parents work, and the child lives in the street and goes his own way. We speak of peace. These are the things that threaten peace. I think that today peace is threatened by abortion, too, which is a true war, the direct killing of a child by its own mother. In the Bible we read that God clearly said: “Even though a mother did forget her infant, I will not forget him.”Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace. We who are here today were wanted by our parents. We would not be here if our parents had not wanted us.We want children, and we love them. But what about the other millions? Many are concerned about the children, like those in Africa, who die in great numbers either from hunger or for other reasons. But millions of children die intentionally, by the will of their mothers. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing.
"Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko says he’s ready to give his life for Ukraine" https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/vitali-klitschko-says-hes-ready-to-give-his-life-for-ukraine/, New York Post, 18 March 2022
“The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”
“Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.”
“Everybody told me to be a man. Nobody told me how.”
Source: Twisted
“An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”
Source: The Genius of Christianity or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion
“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”
Variant: You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Source: The Satanic Verses
“He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.”
Source: Catch-22
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
Not found in Burke's writings. Appears to be a paraphrase of "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little." sourced to Sydney Smith (1771 - 1845).
Variant: Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
Source: Assata: An Autobiography
“The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.”
Source: "Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You're not free to move unless you've learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use the language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.
Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter II, p. 14.
Source: The Wealth of Nations
“Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.”
Variant: All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.
Source: Hear the Wind Sing
“Nobody's talking to me, but nobody's hassling me either. I guess you can't have everything.”
Source: Go Ask Alice
“Why is it nobody understands me and everybody likes me?”
As quoted in New York Times article "The Einstein Theory of Living; At 65 he leads the simplest of lives — and grapples with the most complex thoughts." http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00713FA3A58157A93C0A81788D85F408485F9 (12 March 1944)
Variants:
Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?
As quoted in The Dark Side of Shakespeare : An Elizabethan Courtier, Diplomat, Spymaster, & Epic Hero, p. 126 https://books.google.com/books?id=-5SxGKrTRUEC&pg=PA126 (2003) by W. Ron Hess
Everyone likes me, yet nobody understands me.
As quoted in "The culture of Einstein" at MSNBC (18 March 2005) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7406337/
1940s
“I was walking through the leaves Falling from the trees.
Feelin' like a stranger nobody sees.”
Song lyrics, Love and Theft (2001), Mississippi
“To be sure you know no actual good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.”
Source: Pride and Prejudice
“theres no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.”
Variant: there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
“and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.”
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera
“She never stumbles,
she's got no place to fall.
She's nobody's child,
the law can't touch her at all.”
“Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.”
Source: The Lost World