Standing Quotes (page 51)
When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up.
Cornel West
WILLIAM ROPER: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
THOMAS MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -man's laws, not God's -and if you cut them down- and you're just the man to do it -d'you really...
Robert Bolt
You know what I am?" he says."What?"I'm an ordinary person."Come on."I know. Who isn't an ordinary person? How horribly presumptuous to want to be anything else. But I have to tell you. I've been treated as something special for so long and I've tried my hardest to be something special but I'm not, I'm not exceptional, I'm smart enough, but I'm not brilliant and I'm not spiritual or even all that focused. I think I can stand that, but I'm not sure if the people around me can.
Michael Cunningham
If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact,
then those patterns will repeat themselves. . . . There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding
Robert M. Pirsig
Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour. Than languish in his slow-chapt power. Let us roll all our strength and all. Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife. Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun. Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
I just wished to know if you mean to marry the girl. Spite of what you said of her lightness, I ha' known her long enough to be sure she'll make a noble wife for any one, let him be what he may; and I mean to stand by her like a brother; and if you mean rightly, you'll not think the worse on me for what I've now said; and if--but no, I'll not say what I'll do to the man who wrongs a hair of her head. He shall rue it to the longest day he lives, that's all. Now, sir, what I ask of you is this....
Elizabeth Gaskell
And if you decide to kill somebody, make it anybody and not somebody: some men are made of more special, precious parts: do not kill if you will a president or a King or a man behind a desk -these have heavenly longitudesenlightened attitudes. If you decide, take uswho stand and smoke and glower; we are rusty with sadnessandfeverishwith climbing broken ladders
Charles Bukowski
The product of causes ... his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms, that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be...
Bertrand Russell