Michelle > Michelle's Quotes

“If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.”
― Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

“The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.”
― Iris Chang

“Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.”
― Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

“The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent.”
― Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

“Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.”
― Iris Chang

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”
― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”
― Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

“The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”
― Rebecca West

“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.”
― Rebecca West

“I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“...[A] rebel who is inaccurate and mad is a traitor.”
― Rebecca West

“Goodness is adorable, and it is immortal. When it is trodden down into the earth it springs up again, and human beings scrabble in the dust to find the first green seedling of its return. The stock cannot survive save by the mutual kindness of men and women, of old and young, of state and individual. Hatred comes before love, and gives the hater strange and delicious pleasures, but its works are short-lived; the head is cut from the body before the time of natural death, the lie is told to frustrate the other rogue’s plan before it comes to fruit. Sooner or later society tires of making a mosaic of these evil fragments; and even if the rule of hatred lasts some centuries it occupies no place in real time, it is a hiatus in reality, and not the vastest material thefts, not world wide raids on mines and granaries, can give it substance.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“Misanthropes have some admirable - if paradoxical - virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial. “ships that pass in the night.” As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.”
― Florence King

“Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.”
― Florence King

“In other countries, congenital introverts simply remain introverts all their lives, neither advancing nor retreating, but America's commitment to extroversion as a national art form can abrade some naturally aloof personalities until they flower into deadly nightshade.”
― Florence King

“To make sure I learned the etiquette of grieving, Granny took me with her to the many funerals she attended. O Death, where is thy sting? Search me. I grew up looking at so many corpses that I still feel a faint touch of surprise whenever I see people move.”
― Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“There's no such thing as a 'writing talent.' Anyone can be taught to write a good sentence. What writers are born with is a 'third ear,' not for words but for human nature. And like people with an ear for music who can play the piano without lessons or notes, we can't explain how we know what we know — we just know.”
― Florence King, Withering Slights: The Bent Pin Collection 2007-2012

“I saw how dating chipped away tiny pieces of a woman’s self-confidence; piece by piece, date by date, she was diminished by some form of unnatural behavior forced on her by social usage.”
― Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.”
― Huey P. Newton

“I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.”
― Huey P. Newton

“Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.
I say ”whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.
We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people.”
― Huey P Newton