A Collection of Quotes
to Inform Popular Education and Democratic Communication
compiled by The Catalyst Centre < http://www.catalystcentre.ca/resource-library/quotes-about-ethicsvaluesmorals/>
The following collection of quotes are a selection that we often use as posters to decorate the walls of
workshops and meetings, sometimes merely leaving them for people to appreciate incidentally, sometimes
using them as an introduction tool (e.g. choose a quote to which you connect and introduce yourself by
sharing the quote and it's meaning to you), sometimes as aid to sharing guidelines for democratic
communication.
Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be
nourished by false words, but only by true words, with
which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is
to name the world, to change it. Once named, the
world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem
and requires of them a new naming. People are not
built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Matthew Coon Come, National Chief Of The Assembly
Of First Nations
If there is no struggle, there is no progress - Those
who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce
controversy are people who want crops without
plowing the ground.
Frederick Douglas, Abolitionist Leader 1817 – 1895
On December 7, 1941, an event took place that had
nothing to do with me or my family and yet which had
devastating consequences for all of us – Japan
bombed Pearl Harbour in a surprise attack. With that
event began one of the shoddiest chapters in the
tortuous history of democracy in North America.
Dr. David Suzuki, Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life.
When women and men understand that working to
eradicate patriarchal domination is a struggle rooted in
the longing to make a world where everyone can live
fully and freely, then we know our work to be a gesture
of love. Let us draw upon that love to heighten our
awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our
courage and strengthen our commitment.
bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist/Thinking
Black
For we have built into all of us, old blueprints of
expectation and response, old structures of oppression
and these must be altered at the same time that we
alter the living condition which are the result of those
structures. For the master's tool will never dismantle
the master's house.
Audre Lorde
We have always lived here: we have the right to go on
living where we are happy and where we want to die.
Only here can we feel whole; nowhere else would we
ever feel complete and our pain would be eternal.
Popul Vuh
We cannot allow some people to be left at the back of
the human rights bus... We must ensure the rights of
individual groups or people --be they indigenous
peoples, or peoples of Asian or African or American
descent, or Jews or Muslims-- are not sacrificed on an
altar of progress for some while there are setbacks to
others.
Racism is a destructive and artificially-manufactured
element in the collective human psyche designed to
fragment the natural desire of human beings to know
and love one another"
Jane Urquhart
If we know that our world is necessarily the world we
bring forth with others, every time we are in conflict
with another human being with whom we want to
remain in co-existence, we cannot affirm what for us is
certain (an absolute truth) because that would negate
the other person. If we want to coexist with the other
person, we must see that his(sic) certainty - however
undesirable it may seem to us - is as legitimate and
valid as our own because, like our own, that certainty
expresses his(sic) conservation of structural coupling
in a domain of existence - however undesirable it may
seem to us. Hence, the only possibility for coexistence
is to opt for a broader perspective, a domain of
existence in which both parties fit in the bringing forth
of a common world.
Humberto Maturana and Fransisco Varela, The Tree of
Knowledge
The roots of art and play lie very close together.
Angus Wilson
The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I
have made my choice. I had no alternative.
Paul Robeson
Define home "not as a comforable, stable, inherited
and familiar space, but instead as an imaginative,
politically-charged space where the familiarity and
sense of affection and commitment lay in shared
A Collection of Quotes compiled by The Catalyst Centre < http://www.catalystcentre.ca/resource-library/quotes-about-ethicsvaluesmorals/>
collective analysis of social injustice as well as a vision
for radical transformation."
Chandra Mohanty
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I
am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now,
when?
Rabbi Hillel
As long as someone else controls your history the truth
shall remain just a mystery
Ben Harper
Be passionately aware that you could be completely
wrong
dian marino
Unless freedom is universal, it is only extended
privilege.
Christopher Hill
Solidarity is not an act of charity, but mutual aid
between forces fighting for the same objective.
Samora Machel
People always call me a feminist when I express
opinions which differentiate me from a doormat.
Rebecca West
Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect
happiness is unrealizable; but there are few who
pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect
unhappiness is equally unattainable.
Primo Levi
Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is
what gives me the fundamental principle of morality,
namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting,
and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and
limiting life are evil.
Albert Schweitzer Kulturphilosophie (1923) Translated
by C. T. Campion as Philosophy of Civilisation (1949)
You can only find truth with logic if you have already
found truth without it.
G.K. Chesterton
The [person] who has become a thinking being feels a
compulsion to give every will-to-live the same
reverence for life that [they give] to [their] own. [They
experience] that other life in [their] own.
Albert Schweitzer Kulturphilosophie (1923) Translated
by C. T. Campion as Philosophy of Civilisation (1949)
The thinking [person] must oppose all cruel customs no
matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded
by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid
bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even
the lowliest creature; to do so is to renounce our
2
[personhood] and shoulder a guilt which nothing
justifies.
Albert Schweitzer Kulturphilosophie (1923) Translated
by C. T. Campion as Philosophy of Civilisation (1949)
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple,
neat, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
When you are not separate from the creative process,
time ceases to exist. You might start to feel tired and
suddenly realize that much time has passed. It isn't
necessarily a happy time - and may be very difficult to
start if it is a job or an obligation. But if' you start with
all the concrete needs and proceed in a thorough way the creative process will take over and you will forget
whether it is work or play. Working in the here and now
is one of the most uncontaminated ways to work.
Corita Kent
Creativity: a type of learning process where the teacher
and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
A man who has a vision is not able to use the power of
it until after he has performed the vision on earth for
the people to see.
Black Elk
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in
nature, nor do the children of men as a whole
experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long
run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring
adventure, or nothing.
Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith
Art is not a mirror with which to reflect the world, but a
hammer with which to shape it.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs
there.
Sidney J. Harris, Leaving the Surface
God respects me when I work but He loves me when I
sing.
Rabindranath Tagore
You will do foolish things, but do them with
enthusiasm.
Collette
I'd rather know some of the questions than all of the
answers.
James Thurber
I've tried to live my life right, just like a story.
Angela Sidney, Tagish elder, to Julie Cruikshank,
anthropologist
A Collection of Quotes compiled by The Catalyst Centre < http://www.catalystcentre.ca/resource-library/quotes-about-ethicsvaluesmorals/>
Life does not acommodate you, it shatters you. It is
meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed
destroys its container or else there would be no
fruition.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
3
Anne Frank
I never practice; I always play.
Wanda Landowska
"One can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the
Queen. "When I was your age I always did it for halfan-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many
as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carroll, through the Looking Glass
Rocks in the water don't know the misery of rocks in
the sun.
Haitian proverb
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of
you.
Maya Angelou
And, on the eighth day, it is said, God invented
storytelling.
Midrash
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or
tell a story about them.
Isak Dinesen
When you get past making labels for things, it is
possible to combine and transform elements into new
things. Look at things until their import, identity, name,
use, and description have dissolved.
Corita Kent
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the
sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a
luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and
humorous to have a nose at all.
G.K. Chesterton
A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
Susan Griffin
What comes from the lips reaches the ear. What
comes from the heart, reaches the heart.
Arab proverb
The struggle against tyranny is the struggle of memory
against forgetting.
Czech Historian
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
Solidarity is based on the principle that we are willing
to put ourselves at risk to protect each other.
Starhawk
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the
powerful and the powerless means to side with the
powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire
ubuntu: I exist because you exist
There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from
having... money in the bank.
Tom Robbins
I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive
Thinking, and then I thought: what the hell good would
that do?
Ronnie Shakes
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole
world and lose his soul?
Matthew 16:26
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we
should find in each person's life, sorrow and suffering
enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is better to light one candle than to curse the
darkness.
Peter Benenson
In spite of everything, I still believe that people are
good at heart.
Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal
reciprocity.”
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Difference is that raw and powerful connection from
which our personal power is forged... We have been
taught to either ignore our differences or to view them
as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as
forces for change. Without community, there is no
liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary
armistice between an individual and her oppression...
Survival is learning to take our difference and make
them strengths.
Audre Lorde
How sweet to be a Cloud
Floating in the Blue!
A.A. Milne
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the
death your right to say it.
Voltaire
A Collection of Quotes compiled by The Catalyst Centre < http://www.catalystcentre.ca/resource-library/quotes-about-ethicsvaluesmorals/>
Doublethink means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and
accepting both of them.
George Orwell, 1984
The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have
managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate,
we ask ourselves, "Are these words true?" If so, we let
them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate
we ask, "Are they necessary?" At the last gate, we ask,
"Are they kind?"
Eknath Easwaran
It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was
greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!"
he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined,
changed the verb and said, "They all feed one
another," and called it good.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
If I can't dance then I don't want to be part of your
revolution.
Emma Goldman
When I was young I admired clever people. Now that I
am old I admire kind people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
When you have a lot of things to do, get your nap out
of the way first.
Jo Andersen
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Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it
and whispers, "Grow,grow."
The Talmud
Do not be a magician,
be magic.
Leonard Cohen
The trick is to have lots of ideas and throw away
the bad ones.
Linus Pauling
Advice from an old carpenter: measure twice; saw
once.
It's difficult to work in groups when you're omnipotent.
Q (John DeLancey) Star Trek: The Next Generation
He who knows much,
speaks with silence.
Amharic saying
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to
another that we live at all. And often enough our faith
beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that
makes the result come true.
William James
None learned the art of archery from me
Who did not make me,
in the end, the target.
Saadi of Shiraz