Quotes & Excerpts

"There is no doubt that Garibaldi's romantic career in a lifelong fight for freedom was born of a liking for the fray, to express it bluntly, with freedom as a convenient excuse. This sounds unkind, but it is not. Garibaldi loved peace so much that he was willing to fight for it any day."

- 1916, Elbert Hubbards's Little Journeys, Vol. IX, Great Reformers.

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"The work of eloquence is to change the opinions of a lifetime in twenty minutes."
- Emerson

A moody child and wildly wise
Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
Which chose, like meteors, their way,
And rived the dark with private ray:
They overleapt the horizon's edge,
Searched with Apollo's privilege;
Through man, and woman, and sea, and star
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

-Emerson

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"...The worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism- how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me! I would rather be hacked in peices than take part in such an adominable business. My opinion of the human race is high enough that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commerical and political interests acting through the schools and the Press."

"The United States, because of it's geographic location, is in the fortunate position of being able to teach sane pacifism in the schools, for there exists no serious danger of foreign aggression and hence there is no necessity for inculcating in youth a military spirit. There is, however, a danger that the problem of education for peace may be handled from an emotional, rather than a realisitic standpoint."

"The greatest obstacle to international order is that monstrously exaggerated spirit of nationalism which also goes by the fair-sounding but misused name of patriotism." - 1931, Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein

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"Not infrequently, revolutionaries themselves become reactionary by falling into sectarianism in the process of respoding to the sectarianism of the Right."

"The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility."

"Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one's arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait."

- 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

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"When she chooses a three-story dollhouse with electric lights and an enclosed front porch it is not to pretend at future housewifery, but to arrange and rearrange the Happy Porter Family and their to-scale furniture into varying patterns of orderliness until she arrives at Perfectimundo."

- Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg

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"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."

- The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

* * *

"At midnight he put on his Sunday suit and went to stand alone under Fermina Daza's balcony to play the love waltz he had composed for her, which was known only to the two of them and which for three years had been the emblem of their frustrated complicity. He played, murmuring the words, his violin bathed in tears, with an inspiration so intense that with the first measures the dogs on the street and then the dogs all over the city began to howl, but then, little by little, they were quieted by the spell of the music, and the waltz ended in supernatural silence. The balcony did not open, and no one appeared on the street, not even the night watchman, who almost always came running with his oil lamp in an effort to profit in some small way from serenades. The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put his violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable deterination never to return."

- Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

* * *

She paused in the archway, her weight on one foot and considered him a moment. Thought of plucking his suspenders. Grinned to herself, crept over to the piano and hit C sharp. He sprang back with a cry--immediately Materia feared she'd gone too far, he must be really hurt, he's going to be really mad, she bit her lip--he clapped a hand over one eye, and beheld the culprit with the other.
The darkest eyes he'd ever seen, wet with light. Coal-black curls escaping from two long braids. Summer skin the color of sand stroked by the tide. slim in her green and navy Holy Angels pinafore. His right eye wept while his left eye rejoiced. His lips parted silently. He wanted to say, "I know you," but none of the facts of his life backed this up so he merely stared, smitten and unsurprised.
She smiled and said, "I'm going to marry a dentist."
She had an accent that she never did outgrow. A softening of consonants, a slightly liquid "r", a tendency to clip not with the lips but with the throat itself. What she did with the english language was pure music.
"I'm not a dentist," he said, then rushed pink to his ears.
She smiled. And looked at the loose piano teeth scatered at his feet.

- Fall On Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald