D through G

D

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

Danish Proverbs

It's possible to light another man's candle without damaging your own.

An old error has more friends than a new truth.

It is better to suffer for truth than prosper by falsehood.

Rubén Darío (Nicaraguan poet, 1867-1916)

The America of Moctezuma and Atahualpa,
the aromatic America of Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America where noble Cuauhtémoc said:
"I am not on a bed of roses"--our America
trembling with hurricanes, trembling with Love:
O men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,
our America lives. And dreams. And loves.
And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful.

Clarence Darrow (U.S. lawyer and reformer, 1857-1938)

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

Angela Davis (U.S. author and social activist, 1944- )

Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.

Clarence Day (U.S. writer, 1874-1935)

The test of a civilized person is first self-awareness, and then depth after depth of sincerity in self-confrontation.

Eugene V. Debs (U.S. socialist leader, 1855-1926)

While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Martin Delany (U.S. physician, 1812-1885)

I am not in favor of caste, nor separation of the brotherhood of mankind, and would as willingly live among white men as Black, if I had equal possession and enjoyment of privileges, but I shall never be reconciled living among them subservient to their will.

Lloyd deMause (U.S. psychohistorian, 1931- )

The evolution of culture is ultimately determined by the amount of love, understanding and freedom experienced by its children... Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to become, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.

Agnes de Mille (U.S. choreographer, 1905-1993)

I learned three important things in college--to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes. What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.

Barbara Deming (U.S. author and activist, 1917- )

The longer we listen to one another--with real attention--the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women--whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.

Aubrey T. de Vere (French-born Earl of Oxford, c. 1110-1194)

Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain.

Bernadette Devlin (Irish politician, 1947- )

There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents--if the term is to be used at all.

John Dewey (U.S. education reformer, 1859-1952)

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.

The great waste comes from [the child's] inability to utilize the experience he gets outside of school in any complete and free way within the school itself while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school - its isolation from life.

Dhammapada (Buddhist poetry collection, c. 300 B.C.)

The wise man will not look for the faults of others, nor for what they have done or left undone, but will look rather to his own misdeeds.

Isak Dinesen (Danish writer, 1885-1962)

It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.

Benjamin Disraeli (English statesman and novelist, 1804-1881)

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but reveal to them their own.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.

Justice is truth in action.

A university should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

John Donne (English metaphysical poet, c. 1572-1631)

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Frederick Douglas (U.S. abolitionist and journalist, 1817-1895)

You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know.

The sunlight that has brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling in the nation must be quickened, the conscience of the nation must be roused, the propriety of the nation must be startled, the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed: and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.

We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.

If I have advocated the cause of the Negro, it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Helen Gahagan Douglas (U.S. actor and Congresswoman, 1900-1980)

To be free you must afford freedom to your neighbor, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin, and that sometimes, for some, is very difficult.

John Dryden (English poet and playwright, 1631-1700)

By education most have been misled;
So the believe, because they so were bred.
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.

W.E.B. Du Bois (U.S. teacher and writer, 1868-1963)

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

One ever feels his two-ness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.

Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor--all men know something of poverty. Not that men are wicked--who is good? Not that men are ignorant--what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.

Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.

This the American Black man knows: his fight is a fight to the finish. Either he dies or he wins. He will enter modern civilization in America as a Black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the west.

The price of liberty is less than the price of repression.

Rene Dubos (U.S. microbiologist and experimental pathologist, 1901-1982)

Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.

Will Durant (U.S. teacher and philosopher, 1885-1981)

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

Andrea Dworkin (U.S. feminist author, 1946- )

Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

E

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

Abba Eban (Israeli diplomat and politician, 1915- )

A nation writes its history in the image of its ideal.

Thomas Edison (U.S. scientist and inventor, 1847-1931)

Somewhere between the ages of eleven and fifteen, the average child begins to suffer from an atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble, I should judge, to lie with the schools.

Harry Edwards (U.S. sociologist, 1942- )

In the '60s, it was Jim Crow. In the '80s it's Mr. James Crow, Esquire.

Barbara Ehrenreich (U.S. journalist, 1941- )

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

Albert Einstein (German-Swiss U.S. physicist, 1879-1955)

The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.

Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be kept by understanding.

A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.

Many times a day I realize how much my own inner and outer life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods--in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice I can help the greatest of all causes -- goodwill among men and peace on earth.

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

T.S. Eliot (U.S.-born English poet and playwright, 1888-1965)

We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

Ralph Ellison (U.S. writer and educator, 1914- )

I am a man of substance and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to posses a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality--that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (U.S. poet, 1803-1882)

What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?

We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.

Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear this morning brings
The outrage of the poor.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

English Proverbs

Practice what you preach.

Euripides (Greek playwright, 480-405 B.C.)

An ally need not own the land he helps.

F

In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920--the same year women won the vote.

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

Frantz Fanon (U.S. psychiatrist, 1925-1961)

Anti-Semitism hits me on the head: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother.

What matters is not to know the world but to change it.

Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.

If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built.

Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When the dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.

Sissy Farenthold (U.S. lawyer, 1926- )

I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns and women join the unqualified men in running our government.

George Farquhar (English playwright, 1678-1707)

There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

William Faulkner (U.S. novelist, 1897-1962)

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash, your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them.

They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion--not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

Jules Feiffer (U.S. cartoonist, 1929- )

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I was not poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still do not have a dime but I have a great vocabulary.

Edna Ferber (U.S. novelist and playwright, 1885-1968)

A closed mind is a dying mind.

I am not belittling the brave pioneer men, but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.

Charles Ferguson (U.S. linguist, 1921-1998)

A fierce and sentimental addiction to forms makes us shudder at change. It is much easier to say that the system is all right--only the people need to be improved.

It is much simpler and easier to collect and caress the trophies of our democratic inheritance than it is to fashion up-to-date tools with which to work on our current problems.

Any attempt to disturb the deadly routine of instruction is looked upon as sabotage. And the notion that the aims and functions of education should be determined in the local community by a close and continuous discussion among students, faculty, administration, and citizens is so visionary that it is not even seriously considered.

Francisco Ferrer (Spanish political activist, 1849-1909)

We must destroy all which in the present school answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings by which children are separated from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent.

Harvey Fierstein (U.S. playwright and actor, 1954- )

CBS really wants me on TV. That's their aim. My aim is to have an all-gay sitcom someday, with heterosexuals as token guest stars. Let them be the next-door neighbors for a change.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (U.S. writer, 1879-1958)

Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

M.P. Follett (U.S. sociologist, 1868-1933)

Fear of difference is fear of life itself.

What people often mean by getting rid of conflict is getting rid of diversity, and it is of the utmost importance that these should not be considered the same.

Malcolm Forbes (U.S. publisher, 1919-1990)

The goal of education is to replace an empty mind with an open mind.

Clyde Ford (U.S. historian, 1952- )

We cannot choose the color of our skin, but we can choose the nature of our beliefs.

E.M. Forster (English novelist, 1879-1970)

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel--it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks--his pipe might fall out if he did.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

T. Thomas Fortune (U.S. journalist, 1856-1928)

It is the sleepless agent of colonization. It has penetrated the utmost bounds of the globe. It has wrenched from the weak their fertile valleys and luxuriant hillsides; and when they protested, when they resisted, it has enslaved them or cut their throats.

Henry Emerson Fosdick (U.S. religious leader, 1878-1969)

Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.

Charles Fourier (French social reformer, 1772-1837)

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

Anatole France (French novelist and poet, 1844-1924)

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and steal bread.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.

Anne Frank (German-Jewish diarist, 1929-1945)

...the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Barney Frank (U.S. politician, 1940- )

They have to convert our agenda into something aggressive. Two guys wanting to be happy together are invading their marriages. Helping a kid who's getting beaten up in school is promoting homosexuality. If you gave me a million dollars, I wouldn't know how to promote homosexuality.

Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law.

Victor Frankl (Austrian psychiatrist and author, 1905-1997)

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Antonia Fraser (U.S. author, 1932- )

Of course there's no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if she exists.

French Proverbs

Ignorance and incuriosity are two very soft pillows.

The world is a barrel, for all to draw from.

Children have more need of models than critics.

Only he who does nothing makes a mistake.

He who teaches, learns.

Betty Friedan (U.S. feminist, 1921- )

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

The problem that has no name--which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities--is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.

Men weren't really the enemy--they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women.

Paulo Friere (Brazilian adult educator, 1922-1997)

The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual.

Erich Fromm (German-born U.S. psychoanalyst, 1900-1980)

Men are born equal but they are also born different.

Robert Frost (U.S. poet, 1874-1963)

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Athol Fugard (South African playwright, 1932- )

We compound our suffering by victimizing each other.

Margaret Fuller (U.S. author and critic, 1810-1850)

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to women as freely as to men. If you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply--any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea captains, if you will.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Thomas Fuller (English pysician and writer, 1654-1734)

None so deaf as he who will not hear.

Let him who expects one class of society to prosper in the highest degree, while the other is in distress, try whether one side of the face can smile while the other is pinched.

G

Before healing others, heal yourself.

Indira Gandhi (Indian politician, 1917-1984)

Peace we want because there is another war to fight against poverty, disease and ignorance.

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.

Mankind will endure when the world appreciates the logic of diversity.

Mahatma Gandhi (Hindu nationalist leader, 1869-1948)

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

In matters of conscience the Law of Majority has no place.

Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking, or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; to me, the female sex is not the weaker sex.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

A non-violent revolution is not a program of seizure of power. It is a program of transformation of relationships, ending in a peaceful transfer of power.

Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado, or lordliness. It consists in daring to do the right and facing the consequences, whether it is in matters social, political, or other. It consists in deeds, not in words.

No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.

Lella Gandini (U.S. early childhood educator and writer)

All children have preparedness, potential, curiosity and interest in constructing their learning, in engaging in social interaction and in negotiating with everything the environment brings to them.

Henry Highland Garnet (U.S. minister, 1815-1852)

In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man.

William Lloyd Garrison (U.S. editor and abolitionist, 1805-1879)

Let Southern oppressors tremble--let their secret abettors tremble--let their Northern apologists tremble--let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble.

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

I will be as harsh as truth as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.

Marcus Garvey (U.S. civil rights activist, 1887-1940)

We are not engaged in domestic politics, in church building or in social uplift work, but we are engaged in nation building.

The whole world is run on bluff. No race, no nation, no man has any divine right to take advantage of others. Why allow the other fellow to bluff you?

José Ortega y Gasset (Spanish philosopher, 1883-1955)

I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

German Proverb

Both noble and common blood are the same color.

For rich and poor alike the womb is equally warm.

Geronimo (Chiricahua Apache Chief, 1829-1909)

We had no churches, no religious organizations, so sabbath day, no holidays, and yet we worshiped. Sometimes the whole tribe would assemble and sing and pray; sometimes a smaller number, perhaps only two or three. The songs had a few words, but were not formal. The singer would occasionally put in such words as he wished instead of the usual tone sound. Sometimes we prayed in silence; sometimes each prayed aloud; sometimes an aged person prayed for all of us. At other times one would rise and speak to us of our duties to each other and to Usen. Our services were short.

Ghana Proverb

There is no medicine to cure hatred.

The white man lives in the castle; when he dies, he lies in the ground.

Aurobindo Ghose (Indian political leader, 1872-1950)

To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom is the very height of ignorance and futility.

James Cardinal Gibbons (U.S. preacher, 1834-1921)

Reform must come from within, not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue.

Kahlil Gibran (Syrian-American mystic and poet, 1883-1931)

You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

André Gide (French novelist and essayist, 1869-1951)

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (U.S. educator and activist, 1860-1935)

It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should lift the world forward. That is what they are for.

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

I ran against a Prejudice
That quite cut off the view.

Natalia Ginzberg (Italian writer, 1916-1991)

Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.

Nikki Giovanni (U.S. poet and writer, 1943- )

It is not who you attend school with, but who controls the school you attend.

I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility.

Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.

His headstone said
FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST
But death is a slave's freedom
We seek the freedom of free men
And the construction of a world
Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached nonviolence.

William Ewart Gladstone (English politician, 1809-1898)

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German poet and playwright, 1749-1832)

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

Michael Goff (U.S. editor, 1965- )

Forget your stereotypes, your fears. Straight people are not what you have been led to believe. They're a wonderfully diverse bunch, though the flamboyant ones hog all the media attention.

Whoopi Goldberg (U.S. actor, 1955- )

Normal is in the eye of the beholder.

Emma Goldman (Russian-American Jewish lecturer and activist, 1869-1940)

No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.

Oliver Goldsmith (Irish novelist and playwright, 1728-1774)

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Ellen Goodman (U.S. columnist, 1941- )

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.

Baltasar Gracian (Spanish writer and priest, 1601-1658)

The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good.

Grand Council of American Indians (1927)

We want freedom from the white man rather than to be integrated. We don't want any part of the establishment, we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways, to be able to hunt and fish and live in peace. We don't want power, we don't want to be congressmen, or bankers....we want to be ourselves. We want to have our heritage, because we are the owners of this land and because we belong here.

Greek Proverb

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Every tale can be told in a different way.

Rayna Green (Cherokee author and folklorist, 1942- )

By the time they reach second grade, every child in the country knows what an Indian is. They wear lots of feathers, ride spotted ponies and shoot arrows. Indians who don't fit the type are invisible; they simply can't be imagined by the majority of white children or adults.

Germaine Greer (English journalist, 1939- )

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Dick Gregory (U.S. civil rights activist, 1932- )

America is concerned more with the possibility of moon folks than the reality of hungry poor folks.

Education means to bring out wisdom. Indoctrination means to push in knowledge.

If a man calls me a nigger, he is calling me something I am not. The nigger exists only in his own mind; therefore his mind is the nigger. I must feel sorry for such a man.

Whenever the dollar is held supreme and capitalistic interests dominate, a higher value will always be placed upon property rights than upon human rights.

What price would God demand from the churches for having the audacity to lighten the color of his son's skin, and straighten out his nappy hair?

Stephen Grellet (French-born U.S. Quaker minister and missionary, 1773-1855)

I expect to pass through this world but once, therefore any good that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

John Howard Griffin (U.S. writer and social critic, 1920-1980)

If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the effects of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions.

When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of 'benign neglect,' how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made--not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us.

Sarah Grimké (U.S. abolitionist and suffragist, 1792-1873)

I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy.

Che Guevara (Cuban revolutionary, 1928-1967)

The question is one of fighting the causes and not just being satisfied with getting rid of the effects.

Nicolas Guillén (Cuban poet, 1902-1989)

We've got Chinese, white, black and mixed; but remember that our colors are cheap, for after many years of contracts and tricks nobody's purity runs very deep.

Lani Guinier (U.S. civil rights lawyer and professor)

As a country, we are in a state of denial about issues of race and racism. And too many of our leaders have concluded that the way to remedy racism is to simply stop talking about race.

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