Here is a compilation of inspirational and provocative quotes, sayings and proverbs which we've used on our web site and our email newsletters. Maybe you can use them too! We'll be updating this page now and again.

A-E F-J K-L M-N O-S T-Z

God please protect me from my friends and I will take care of my enemies.
- Imam Ali

I believe there's something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
- Woody Allen

When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning, by dreams that need completion, by pure love that needs expressing, then we truly live life.
- Greg Anderson

The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly welded by the fiercest fire.
- Anonymous

One head cannot go into counsel.
- Ashanti proverb

At the very least, the individual can challenge the silence of assumed consensus. By breaking the silence, by refusing to collude with evil and insanity, one resists its darkness. Breaking the silence is, I think, the most significant thing we do as individuals. Sometimes even without speaking, one can challenge the silence, as did the women in Argentina during the military regime. These women, Las Madres de la Plaza, refused to be intimidated by death squads. They kept their regular vigil; their presence alone was a blatant accusation of murder and brutality. They also showed that the power of one is acted out in community, not in solitude. We sustain each other in dark times, sometimes simply by being present together.
- Mary-Wynne Ashford in her essay, Staying the Course

Powerlessness and silence go together. We...should use our positions not as a shelter from the world's reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used.
- Margaret Atwood

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
- Richard Bach

Those hopes, you reply, are in tatters. Yet what does this really change? Justice is still a one-word prayer, as Ziggy Marley sings in your time now. The whole of history is about hopes being sustained, lost, renewed. And with new hopes come new theories. But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes the strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between his or her teeth is a brother or sister who commands respect. Those without hope in the real world are condemned to be alone. The best they can offer is only pity. And whether these hopes between the teeth are fresh or tattered makes little difference when it comes to surviving the nights and imagining a new day.
- John Berger, Hold Everything Dear

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
- Paul Boese

Art is not a mirror to reflect society but a hammer with which to shape it.
- Bertolt Brecht

We need to voice the violence, to hear the stories of all those affected by violence . . . Spreading the word, breaking down the taboos and exposing the violence that takes place among us is the first step towards effective action to reduce violence in our own societies.
- Gro Harlem Brundtland

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
- Buddha

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another person's observation, not overturning it.
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke

C

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.
- Albert Camus

I believe in a million revolutions in little neighbourhoods.
- Manu Chao, musician

An imagination that is pickled in, and sullied by its own bitterness, is never the greatest tool to write a story with.
-Brian Chikwava

If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice.
- Noam Chomsky

If you are planning for one year, plant rice. If you are planning for ten years, plant trees. If you are planning for 100 years, plant education.
- Chinese proverb

One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.
- Chinese proverb

That the birds of worry and care fly above your head,
This you cannot change;
But that they build nests in your hair,
This you can prevent.
- Chinese proverb

I find that some of the poetry I wrote before independence still suits the situation here today. We had just a few days of independence.
- Julius Chingono

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know that just to be alive is a grand thing.
- Agatha Christie

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.
- Winston Churchill

Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.
- Winston Churchill

Never run away from anything. Never!
- Winston Churchill

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another. The former would seem most necessary for the camp, the latter for the council; but to constitute a great man, both are necessary.
- Charles Caleb Colton

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising each time we fall.
- Confucius

Isn’t a silent population dangerous? Where will it hide the burden of its choice?
- Jose Craveirinha, Mozambican poet

The only thing that makes me different from a lot of other people - aside from a large ego and thinking I can do things and it not occurring to me that I can't - is a sense of personal responsibility. I grew up with a sense that if you don't stand up for what you believe in, in a very active way, you're a collaborator. I realize when I talk to other people that they think exactly what I think; they read the newspaper and they cry, they're horrified by things that go on, but somehow there's a disconnect between them and all that stuff.
- Wendy Cukier of the Coalition for Gun Control in Canada on her sense of personal responsibility

Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilisation. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.
- Eugene V Debs

I hate you – precisely because I have allowed you so much and even more because I need you so much.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment and be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.
- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

Great ideas have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
- Albert Einstein

Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
- Albert Einstein

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein

Only those who will risk going to far can possibly find out how far one can go.
- T.S. Eliot

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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