Causes Quotes (page 34)
THE CAUSE of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
Ulysses S. Grant
[Dionysos'] being torn into pieces, the genuine Dionysiac suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, so that we are to regard the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering.... In the view described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the...
Friedrich Nietzsche
I was the daughter of my father's wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin. I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my chi , the spirit that caused me so much pain. Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
Amy Tan
a bad map is worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside these instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the...
Cormac McCarthy
They had not, under the heavens and on earth, one single weapon. They don't control the land they live on, the schools which train them, the heat and food their bodies need to live through the winter's cold, the media which gives them language, the military weapons for which they give most of their money. There is no more time in this city. Reasonable people don't let themselves dream because no dream can be true. They have a cry that bought them back to first causes: But we who have no...
Kathy Acker
I’m trying to decide
Which way to go
I think I made a wrong turn back there somewhere
Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know
Tried to move but I lost my way
Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know
Stopped to watch my emotions sway
Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know
Knew the toll, but I would not pay
Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know
Cause you never know where the cards may lay
Time to save the world
Where in the world is all the time
So many things I still don’t know
So many times I’ve changed my...
Erykah Badu