...Sometimes when I get down or things seem dark, I like to read something inspirational.
Ideas are beautiful things that can live forever. An idea can't be destroyed with a sword or a bomb. It can spread like a disease, infecting or enlightening all that are in its path. An idea lives or dies on the strength of its wisdom. It can point to a truth that we try to deny. Ideas can drive the darkness back into the night & push the sea, if they're strong enough.
Here are some that bring me comfort...
Robert F. Kennedy
- "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
- "I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil."
Mohandas Gandhi
- "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
- "Courage has never been known to be a matter of muscle; it is a matter of the heart. The toughest muscle has been known to tremble before an imaginary fear. It was the heart that set the muscle atrembling."
- "All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take."
Edward Kennedy
- "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
- "As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'"
Martin Luther King Jr.
- "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that."
- "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."
William Faulkner
- "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
- "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
- "Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
- "A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."