Quotes about struggle
page 6

W. H. Auden photo
Ben Stein photo
David Lynch photo

“In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

As quoted in "Lost Highway" interview by Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone (6 March 1997)

Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Louis Brandeis photo
David McNally photo

“The suffering inflicted by this present order invariably produces a struggle to overcome it.”

David McNally (1953) Canadian political scientist

Conclusion, p. 275
Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002)

Karl Jaspers photo
Gholam-Hossein Elham photo

“We firmly believe that the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq will result in a speedy resolution to most of the problems that country is currently struggling with.”

Gholam-Hossein Elham (1959) Iranian politician

No change in Iran's US policy, Press TV, 2007-07-22, 2007-07-23 http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=17143&sectionid=351020101,

Nikos Kazantzakis photo
John McCain photo

“Diane Sawyer: Do you agree the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent?
McCain: Well, I think it‘s very serious. I think it‘s a serious situation.
Sawyer: Not precarious and urgent?
McCain: Oh, I don‘t know exactly—run through the vocabulary. But it‘s a very serious situation. But there‘s a lot of things we need to do. We have a lot of work to do and I‘m afraid that it‘s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border.”

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

Good Morning America interview, after recent news that escalating insurgency and violent incidents had left around 2,500 people dead (over 700 of them civilians) since January of the same year in Afghanistan; 21 July 2008; http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25799429/
2000s, 2008

Tenzin Gyatso photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“They call my people 'Spics' in New York. These are poor people struggling to make a living and should be treated like people and not animals.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Interviewed in September 1972, as quoted in "Clemente Legend Growing" by Bob Addie, in The Washington Post (Wednesday, May 23, 1973), p. E5
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1972</big>

Edgar Guest photo
Ehud Olmert photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune — civil war. Mindful of the lessons of the Commune, it knew that the proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Lessons of the Commune”, in Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 (23 March 1908) http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm, as translated by Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478.
1900s
Variant: The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes. This was first demonstrated by the French proletariat in the Commune and brilliantly confirmed by the Russian proletariat in the December uprising.

Larry Solov photo
Mao Zedong photo

“Ideological education is the key link to be grasped in uniting the whole Party for great political struggles. Unless this is done, the Party cannot accomplish any of its political tasks.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Coalition Government (1945)

George W. Bush photo
Paul Simon photo

“The problem is all inside your head, she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
Song lyrics, Still Crazy After All These Years (1975)

George Meredith photo
Mao Zedong photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo
Frances Kellor photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Richard Feynman photo
Margaret Cho photo
Mao Zedong photo

“Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end.”

On Contradiction (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 党内不同思想的对立和斗争是经常发生的,这是社会的阶级矛盾和新旧事物的矛盾在党内的反映。党内如果没有矛盾和解决矛盾的思想斗争,党的生命也就停止了。

Sarah Grimké photo
Aga Khan IV photo
Don Marquis photo

“well boss
mehitabel the cat
has reappeared in her old
haunts with a
flock of kittens

archy she said to me
yesterday
the life of a female
artist is continually
hampered what in hell
have i done to deserve
all these kittens
i look back on my life
and it seems to me to be
just one damned kitten
after another
i am a dancer archy
and my only prayer
is to be allowed
to give my best to my art
but just as i feel
that i am succeeding
in my life work
along comes another batch
of these damned kittens
it is not archy
that i am shy on mother love
god knows i care for
the sweet little things
curse them
but am i never to be allowed
to live my own life
i have purposely avoided
matrimony in the interests
of the higher life
but i might just
as well have been a domestic
slave for all the freedom
i have gained
i hope none of them
gets run over by
an automobile
my heart would bleed
if anything happened
to them and i found it out
but it isn t fair archy
it isn t fair
these damned tom cats have all
the fun and freedom
if i was like some of these
green eyed feline vamps i know
i would simply walk out on the
bunch of them and
let them shift for themselves
but i am not that kind
archy i am full of mother love
my kindness has always
been my curse
a tender heart is the cross i bear
self sacrifice always and forever
is my motto damn them
i will make a home
for the sweet innocent
little things
unless of course providence
in his wisdom should remove
them they are living
just now in an abandoned
garbage can just behind
a made over stable in greenwich
village and if it rained
into the can before i could
get back and rescue them
i am afraid the little
dears might drown
it makes me shudder just
to think of it
of course if i were a family cat
they would probably
be drowned anyhow
sometimes i think
the kinder thing would be
for me to carry the
sweet little things
over to the river
and drop them in myself
but a mother s love archy
is so unreasonable
something always prevents me
these terrible
conflicts are always
presenting themselves
to the artist
the eternal struggle
between art and life archy
is something fierce
yes something fierce
my what a dramatic
life i have lived
one moment up the next
moment down again
but always gay archy always gay
and always the lady too
in spite of hell
well boss it will
be interesting to note
just how mehitabel
works out her present problem
a dark mystery still broods
over the manner
in which the former
family of three kittens
disappeared
one day she was talking to me
of the kittens
and the next day when i asked
her about them
she said innocently
what kittens
interrogation point
and that was all
i could ever get out
of her on the subject
we had a heavy rain
right after she spoke to me
but probably that garbage can
leaks so the kittens
have not yet
been drowned”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

mehitabel and her kittens http://donmarquis.com/reading-room/kittens/
archy and mehitabel (1927)

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo
Jane Addams photo

“In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

As quoted in The MacMillan Dictionary of Quotations (1989) by John Daintith, Hazel Egerton, Rosalind Ferguson, Anne Stibbs and Edmund Wright, p. 374.

Ilana Mercer photo
John Updike photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Leo Tolstoy photo

“If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival, and so on, — if people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the "Sciences", and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies — their name is legion — and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupefying ballast — the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.”

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), VI

Robert E. Howard photo
Talib Kweli photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
Scott Shaw photo
Alija Izetbegović photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“… I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran … It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words … We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech … The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart … we will not and cannot take him. Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men … Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling.”

Thomas Carlyle, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History" (1841), pg. 64-67
1840s

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Björn Ulvaeus photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

“The University's Part in Political Life” (13 March 1909) in PWW (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson) 19:99
1900s

Vladimir Lenin photo
Joseph Conrad photo
Angela Davis photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
William Morley Punshon photo
Tawakkol Karman photo
Harriet Beecher Stowe photo
Tim Cook photo

“I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others, … So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”

Tim Cook (1960) American business executive

WSJ.com http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/30/apples-tim-cook-im-proud-to-be-gay/?mod=e2fb&mg=blogs-wsj&url=http%253A%252F%252Fblogs.wsj.com%252Fdigits%252F2014%252F10%252F30%252Fapples-tim-cook-im-proud-to-be-gay%253Fmod%253De2fb

Alfred Russel Wallace photo

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Paul Simon photo

“Locked in a struggle for the right combination
Of words in a melody line,
I took a walk along the riverbank of my imagination.
Golden clouds were shuffling the sunshine.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Everything About It Is a Love Song
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)

Jopie Huisman photo

“I feel responsible, because so many people are leaning against me. Of course I can not take that pole away from them, they will fall over. I can see that those people need it! An ongoing struggle, an ordeal - because, if I say something I have to make it happen. In this way, painting is a religious matter. My paintings create a consciousness that offers comfort... It must appear in the light. Somebody of eighty years old who never ever would think about visiting a museum. Recognition!”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: Ik voel me verantwoordelijk, omdat er zoveel mensen tegen me aan leunen. Ik kan die paal natuurlijk niet voor ze wegzagen, dan vallen ze om. Ik zie toch dat die mensen er behoefte aan hebben! Een voortdurend gevecht, een beproeving, want als ik iets zeg moet ik het waarmaken. Schilderen is op deze manier een religieuze aangelegenheid. Door mijn werken ontstaat een bewustzijn, dat troost biedt.. .Het moet voor 't licht komen. Zo'n mens van tachtig dat er nog nooit ook maar één seconde aan heeft gedacht een museum binnen te wandelen. Herkenning.
Mens & Gevoelens: Jopie Huisman', 1993

Alexander Bogdanov photo
Roger Ebert photo
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor photo

“When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically … But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap, as quoted in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (1963) by Paul Arthur Schilpp, p. 25, and in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1991) by Ray Monk, p. 244

Kent Hovind photo
Samuel Johnson photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Rosa Luxemburg photo
Emily Brontë photo
Robert Mugabe photo

“It was from Tito that I drew inspiration while searching for the best road to take and when making crucial decisions during our liberation struggle. I often thought, what would Tito do at that moment?”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Mugabe cited in: Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 400.
1980s

Assata Shakur photo
Niall Ferguson photo

“History is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

"On being called a racist" http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7482658/on-being-called-a-racist/ The Spectator, December 17, 2011

Arun Shourie photo
Bell Hooks photo

“While I expected serious, rigorous evaluation of my work, I was totally unprepared for the hostility and contempt shown me by women whom I did not and do not see as enemies. Despite their responses I share with them an ongoing commitment to feminist struggle. To me this does not mean that we must approach feminism from the same perspective. It does mean we have a basis for communication, that our political commitments should lead us to talk and struggle together. Unfortunately it is often easier to ignore, dismiss, reject, and even hurt one another rather than engage in constructive confrontation. Were it not for the overwhelmingly positive responses to the book from black women who felt it compelled them to either re-think or think for the first time about the impact of sexism on our lives and the importance of feminist movement, I might have become terribly disheartened and disillusioned. Thanks to them and many other women and men this book was not written in isolation. … Such encouragement renews my commitment to feminist politics and strengthens my conviction that the value of feminist writing must be determined not only by the way a work is received among feminist activists but by the extent to which it draws women and men who are outside feminist struggle inside.”

Acknowledgments https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)

Edward Payson photo

“The most of my sufferings and sorrows were occasioned by my own unwillingness to be nothing, which I am, and by struggling to be something.”

Edward Payson (1783–1827) American religious leader

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 335.

Camille Paglia photo

“Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 40
Context: The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history. Mind can never be free of matter. Only by mind imagining itself free can culture advance. The mother-cults, by reconciling man to nature, entrapped him in matter. Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins. Genesis is rigid and unjust, but it gave man hope as a man. It remade the world by male dynasty, canceling the power of mothers.

Halle Berry photo

“When I held that statuette, I felt as if I had won a triumph not just for myself, but for every other woman who'd struggled to overcome the same sort of background.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

On winning an Academy Award — reported in Barbara Davies (August 10, 2008) "Lost and Found", Sunday Telegraph Magazine, p. 18.

Mengistu Neway photo
James Joyce photo
Bernard Landry photo
John McCain photo
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo
Germaine Greer photo
Lucille Ball photo
M.I.A. photo

“Kala is about my mum and her struggle–how do you work, feed your children, nurture them and give them the power of information?”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://www.urb.com/features/183/MIAWorldParty.php?PageId=2 to URB (2007)
Sourced quotes

“Struggling to stay ahead of your rivals? No need. Instead of trying to match or beat them on cost or quality, make the other players irrelevant--by staking out new market space where competitors haven't ventured.”

W. Chan Kim (1951) South Korean economist

Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. "Value innovation." Harvard Business Review, January 1997 (2008).

Nelson Mandela photo
Swami Vivekananda photo
James A. Michener photo
Louis Auguste Blanqui photo
Paulo Freire photo

“Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

Wu Jingzi photo
Savitri Devi photo