Quotes about wing
page 10

Libba Bray photo

“And just like that, something in the cosmos shifts. A butterfly flaps its wings in South America. Snow falls in Chicago. You give an idiot a stupid magic screw and it turns out to be a necessary part after all.”

Source: Going Bovine (2009), p. 389
Context: Marisol does a silly dance with Balder and the screw, one in each hand, so that nobody gets the idea that she takes tins — or anything else, for that matter — seriously. And just like that, something in the cosmos shifts. A butterfly flaps its wings in South America. Snow falls in Chicago. You give an idiot a stupid magic screw and it turns out to be a necessary part after all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo

“Wing Chun doesn't like to lift the knee first and then kick …..”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung
Wisdom Quotes
Source: Comments From Wong Shun Leung and Tsui Shan Ting, by Ray Van Raamsdonk http://www.springtimesong.com/wcqanda.htm

Wallace Stevens photo

“Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”

"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Margaret Fuller photo

“Come, let us mount on the wings of the morning,
Flying for joy of the flight”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Dryad Song (1900)
Context: Come, let us mount on the wings of the morning,
Flying for joy of the flight,
Wild with all longing, now soaring, now staying,
Mingling like day and dawn, swinging and swaying,
Hung like a cloud in the light:
I am immortal! I feel it! I feel it!
Love bears me up, love is might!

Khalil Gibran photo

“Am I less man because I believe in a greater man?
The barriers of flesh and bone fell down when the Poet of Galilee spoke to me; and I was held by a spirit, and was lifted to the heights, and in midair my wings gathered the song of passion.
And when I dismounted from the wind and in the Sanhedrim my pinions were shorn, even then my ribs, my featherless wings, kept and guarded the song.”

Nicodemus The Poet, The Youngest Of The Elders In The Sanhedrim: On Fools And Jugglers
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: Am I less man because I believe in a greater man?
The barriers of flesh and bone fell down when the Poet of Galilee spoke to me; and I was held by a spirit, and was lifted to the heights, and in midair my wings gathered the song of passion.
And when I dismounted from the wind and in the Sanhedrim my pinions were shorn, even then my ribs, my featherless wings, kept and guarded the song. And all the poverties of the lowlands cannot rob me of my treasure.
I have said enough. Let the deaf bury the humming of life in their dead ears. I am content with the sound of His lyre, which He held and struck while the hands of His body were nailed and bleeding.

Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“They belittled this world and exaggerated the importance of the next. They consoled the slave by telling him that in a little while he would exchange his chains for wings. They comforted the captive by saying that in a few days he would leave his dungeon for the bowers of Paradise. His followers believed that he had said that “Whosoever believeth not shall be damned.” This passage was the cross upon which intellectual liberty was crucified.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)
Context: As a result of what he did not teach in connection with what he did teach, his followers saw no harm in slavery, no harm in polygamy. They belittled this world and exaggerated the importance of the next. They consoled the slave by telling him that in a little while he would exchange his chains for wings. They comforted the captive by saying that in a few days he would leave his dungeon for the bowers of Paradise. His followers believed that he had said that “Whosoever believeth not shall be damned.” This passage was the cross upon which intellectual liberty was crucified. If Christ had given us the laws of health; if he had told us how to cure disease by natural means; if he had set the captive free; if he had crowned the people with their rightful power; if he had placed the home above the church; if he had broken all the mental chains; if he had flooded all the caves and dens of fear with light, and filled the future with a common joy, he would in truth have been the Savior of this world.

Virgil photo

“Fear gave wings to his feet.”
Pedibus timor addidit alas.

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VIII, Line 224 (tr. C. Day Lewis)

Bob Black photo

“To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who’d abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else.”

Bob Black (1951) American anarchist

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)
Context: You might object that what I’ve said may apply to the minarchist majority of libertarians, but not to the self-styled anarchists among them. Not so. To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who’d abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else. But this incestuous family squabble is no affair of mine. Both camps call for partial or complete privatization of state functions but neither questions the functions themselves. They don’t denounce what the state does, they just object to who’s doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don’t quibble over their coercers’ credentials. If you can’t pay or don’t want to, you don’t much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.

Noam Chomsky photo

“Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Speech on “Lenin, Trotsky and Socialism and the Soviet Union”, (March 15, 1989) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s
Context: Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement and he was so regarded…by the mainstream Marxists… Bolshevism was a right-wing deviation.

Peter Cook photo

“Have you the wing?”

Peter Cook (1937–1995) British architect

The Princess Bride (1987)

Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“There is a law higher than men can make. The facts as they exist in this poor world -- the absolute consequences of certain acts -- they are above all. And this higher law is the breath of progress, the very outstretched wings of civilization, under which we enjoy the freedom we have.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: There is a law higher than men can make. The facts as they exist in this poor world -- the absolute consequences of certain acts -- they are above all. And this higher law is the breath of progress, the very outstretched wings of civilization, under which we enjoy the freedom we have. Keep that in your minds. There never was a legislature great enough -- there never was a constitution sacred enough, to compel a civilized man to stand between a black man and his liberty. There never was a constitution great enough to make me stand between any human being and his right to express his honest thoughts. Such a constitution is an insult to the human soul, and I would care no more for it than I would for the growl of a wild beast.

Richard Wilbur photo

“It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings”

Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) American poet

"Grace" in The Poems of Richard Wilbur (1963)
Context: Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws
For learning to loiter in air; he merely said,
"I merely leap and pause."

Algernon Charles Swinburne photo

“These were a part of the playing I heard
Once, ere my love and my heart were at strife;
Love that sings and hath wings as a bird,
Balm of the wound and heft of the knife.”

Poems and Ballads (1866-89), The Triumph of Time
Context: p>The pulse of war and passion of wonder,
The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,
The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,
The music burning at heart like wine,
An armed archangel whose hands raise up
All senses mixed in the spirit's cup
Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder —
These things are over, and no more mine. These were a part of the playing I heard
Once, ere my love and my heart were at strife;
Love that sings and hath wings as a bird,
Balm of the wound and heft of the knife.
Fairer than earth is the sea, and sleep
Than overwatching of eyes that weep,
Now time has done with his one sweet word,
The wine and leaven of lovely life.</p

Thomas Bailey Aldrich photo
Thomas Bailey Aldrich photo

“What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Source: "A Shadow of the Night", p. 26 note: Unguarded Gates and Other Poems (1895)

Abimael Guzmán photo
Ketanji Brown Jackson photo
Algis Budrys photo
P. V. Narasimha Rao photo
Anthony Crosland photo
J. Howard Moore photo

“Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", p. 101
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

Kevin D. Williamson photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Caroline Lucas photo

“We would be kidding ourselves if we put our trust in Brazil’s right-wing, pro-business president Jair Bolsonaro to protect it.”

Caroline Lucas (1960) British politician, MP of the Green Party for Brighton Pavilion and former MEP for South-East England

Caroline Lucas MP: The Amazon rainforest must not be sacrificed on the altar of free trade with Europe https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/environment/global-warming/opinion/house-commons/106068/caroline-lucas-mp-amazon-rainforest (23 August 2019)
2019

Clement Attlee photo
Pete Buttigieg photo

“On one hand, the right wing is replete with personalities who undermine everything they profess to stand for. Across the aisle, members of a Democratic party, aghast at the hypocrisy of their counterparts’ personalities, seem themselves reluctant to demonstrate any personality at all.”

Pete Buttigieg (1982) American politician

27 October 2003
Hollywood Hypocrisy vs. Neo-Liberal Neurosis
The Harvard Crimson
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/27/hollywood-hypocrisy-vs-neo-liberal-neurosis-if/
2003

Jesse Jackson photo

“Yes, it was swell to sleep when you were looking forward to something. Time flies by and you don’t even hear the rustle of its wings.”

Fredric Brown (1906–1972) American novelist, short story author

The Angelic Angleworm (p. 70)
Short fiction, From These Ashes (2000)

James Eastland photo

“Today, however, a trend away from traditional standards of propriety begins to be in evidence. Our Court has been indoctrinated and brainwashed by left-wing pressure groups. The Court is out of step with the American people. We see Justices of the Supreme Court banqueted and honored by left-wing Communist-front organizations militantly interested in legislation on which the Supreme Court must pass.”

James Eastland (1904–1986) American politician

Congressional Record https://books.google.fr/books?id=WhPOxPiWV2YC&q=%22indoctrinated+and+brainwashed+by+left-wing+pressure+groups.%22&dq=%22indoctrinated+and+brainwashed+by+left-wing+pressure+groups.%22&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjiodS__tjkAhWLnhQKHSqcBdoQ6AEIcjAJ, 1956
1950s

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Angelina Grimké photo

“I have seen it! I have seen it! I know it has horrors that can never be described. I was brought up under its wing. I witnessed for many years its demoralizing influence and its destructiveness to human happiness. I have never seen a happy slave.”

Angelina Grimké (1805–1879) American abolitionist and feminist

Addressing an abolitionist meeting in Philadelphia, May 14, 1838, as a mob howled outside, throwing bricks and stones into the building, as quoted in [Todras, Ellen H., Angelina Grimké: Voice of Abolition, https://books.google.com/books?id=-S8ZAQAAMAAJ, 1999, Linnet, 978-0-208-02485-5, 3]

Noam Chomsky photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“If we would reach a degree of civilization higher and grander than any yet attained, we should welcome to our ample continent all the nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples, and as fast as they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship, we should incorporate them into the American body politic. The outspread wings of the American eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

As a matter of selfish policy, leaving right and humanity out of the question, we cannot wisely pursue any other course. Other governments mainly depend for security upon the sword; ours depends mainly upon the friendship of the people. In all matters, in time of peace, in time of war, and at all times, it makes its appeal to the people, and to all classes of the people. Its strength lies in their friendship and cheerful support in every time of need, and that policy is a mad one which would reduce the number of its friends by excluding those who would come, or by alienating those who are already here.
1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Paul von Hindenburg photo

“I need them for the manoeuvring of my left wing in the next war.”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

Recommending the annexation of the Baltic Provinces at the Crown Council at Kreuznach (18 December 1917), quoted in John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics 1918-1945 (London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 511, n. 2
Chief of the German General Staff

Zakir Hussain (musician) photo

“The peerless North Indian tabla player…the blur of his fingers rivals the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

The New York Times review after his 2009 Carnegie Hall performance quoted in "Zakir Hussain and Master Musicians of India".
About Zakir Hussain

Bill Bryson photo

“Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable… But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string. Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.”

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 81

Edward Bulwer-Lytton photo
Francesco Dall'Ongaro photo

“Life has two wings : one, sorrow; one, delight;
Love gives it pinions, God directs its flight.”

Francesco Dall'Ongaro (1808–1873) Italian poet, playwright and librettist

Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 308.
Original: (it) Ha due ali la vita : il gaudio e il duolo;
L’amor la impenna, e Dio dirige il volo.
Original: (it) Stornelli, "Una Vedova ad una Sjéosa".

Lewis Gompertz photo
Daniel Abraham photo

“She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 29 (p. 309)

Ivan Pavlov photo

“Perfect as is the wing of a bird, it never could raise the bird up without resting on air. Facts are the air of a scientist. Without them you never can fly. Without them your "theories" are vain efforts.”

Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) Russian physiologist

Bequest of Pavlov to the Academic Youth of His Country. Science, Vol. 83, Issue 2155, pg. 369 (1936)

Townes Van Zandt photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
John Milton photo
Daniel Hannan photo

“History is reinterpreted, and it is taken as axiomatic that fascism must have been Right-wing, the logic seemingly being that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists were nasty.”

Daniel Hannan (1971) British politician

So total is the Left's cultural ascendancy that no one likes to mention the socialist roots of fascism (February 16, 2013), The Telegraph
2010s

Joseph Addison photo

“Music religious heat inspires,
It wakes the soul, and lifts it high,
And wings it with sublime desires,
And fits it to bespeak the Deity.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Song for St. Cecilia's Day (1692), st. 4

Jackson Browne photo

“And their feathers once so fine grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings”

Jackson Browne (1948) American singer-songwriter

Before the Deluge (1974) from For Everyman (1973)

Matt Taibbi photo

“What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

America Is Too Dumb for TV News https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-157274/, The Rolling Stones, Matt Taibbi, November 25, 2015

Mick Mulvaney photo

“As a right-wing conservative and founding member of the Freedom Caucus, I never expected that the co-worker I would work closest, and best, with at the White House would be a "globalist."”

Mick Mulvaney (1967) Director of the Office of Management and Budget

Gary Cohn is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. Having the chance to collaborate with him will remain one of the highlights of my career in public service.”

6 March 2018 https://twitter.com/OMBPress/status/971171732454129664

Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Stanley Kunitz photo

“Be thy best thoughts to work divine addressed;
Do something,— do it soon — will all thy might;
An angel's wing would droop if long at rest,
And God Himself inactive were no longer blessed.”

Carlos Wilcox (1794–1827) American poet

quoted in Three Thousand Selected Quotations From Brilliant Writers (1909) by Josiah H. Gilbert, p. 3
Poetry

Joseph Goebbels photo

“According to the idea of the NSDAP [Nazi party], we are the German left. Nothing is more hateful to us than the right-wing national ownership block„.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Der Angriff (The Attack), (6 December 1931), quoted in Wolfgang Venohr’s book: Documents of German existence: 500 years of German national history 1445-1945, Athenäum Verlag, 1980, p. 291, In German: „Der Idee der NSDAP entsprechend sind wir die deutsche Linke. Nichts ist uns verhaßter als der rechtsstehende nationale Besitzbürgerblock https://historyuncensored.wixsite.com/history-uncensored/historical-quotes
1930s

Newt Gingrich photo

“I see myself as representing the conservative wing of the postindustrial society.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

1980s

Alexis Karpouzos photo
Rumi photo
Charles Wesley photo
John Steinbeck photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“The Dark Ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short.”

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

Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: The Sinews of Peace https://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1946/s460305a_e.htm speech, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946.

“Knowledge comes to a warrior, floating, like specks of gold dust, the same dust that covers the wings of moths. So for a warrior, knowledge is like taking a shower, or being rained on by specks of dark gold dust.”

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from "Tales of Power" (Chapter 10)

Albert Memmi photo
Rita Levi-Montalcini photo

“Everything came easy to me in life. I could always shake off difficulties, like water on a duck's wings.”

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) Italian neurologist

Source: In an interview with Paolo Giordano, 100 anni di futuro, Wired, n. 1, marzo 2009.

Al Sharpton photo

“We don’t want to be manipulated by right-wing elitist billionaires or by left-wing guys that don’t understand our life on the ground that is living in fear of crime, that is living as a result of inflation that is killing us in many parts of the country. We need gas to go to work.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

“Democratic Outlook for 2022 Midterms” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea8LKGL0xXo MSNBC (April 11, 2022)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo

“The liberation of women is like a vast, unfinished house. The west wing is fairly complete….
Go to the east wing, however, and what you find is worse than unfinished.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Source: 2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Chapter 15, “Dishonor, Death, and Feminists” (pp. 233-234)

Emily Brontë photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo