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An enormous conflict between words and deeds is prevalent today: everyone talks about freedom, democracy, justice, human rights, about peace and saving the world from nuclear apocalypse; and at the same time, everyone, more or less, consciously or unconsciously, serves those values and ideals only to the extent necessary to serve himself and his "worldly" interests, personal interests, group interests, power interests, property interests, and state or great-power interests. . . . So the power structures apparently have no other choice than to sink deeper into this vicious maelstrom, and contemporary people apparently have no other choice than to wait around until the final inhibition drops away. But who should begin? Who should break this vicious circle? Responsibility cannot be preached but only borne, and the only possible place to begin is with oneself.

—Vaclav Havel

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justice truth power freedom peace words democracy change responsibility talk values
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For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I, too, abide to dispel the misery of the world.

—14th Dalai Lama

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After the earthquake and the fire comes the still, small voice.

—Dorothy Thompson

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All the gods are dead except the god of war.

—Eldridge Cleaver

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There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

—John Keats

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You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own.

—Antonio Porchia

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And this is the simple truth — that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

—Soren Kierkegaard

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truth life ideas tragedy clinging chaos salvation being lost
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Even for our enemies in misery, there should be tears in our eyes.

—Charan Singh

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Now you know the worst / we humans have to know / about ourselves, and I am sorry.

—Wendell Berry

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After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box.

—Italian proverb

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When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.

—Mahatma Gandhi

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The most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.

—Katherine Anne Porter

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It is simply not true that war never settles anything.

—Felix Frankfurter

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War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation: thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes . . . as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to "feel good" about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.

—Adrienne Rich

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Without your wounds where would your power be? The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken in the wheels of living. In love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.

—Thornton Wilder

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