All Quotes

“For a look, a world; for a smile, a heaven; for a kiss... I don't know what I would give you for a kiss!”

“The memory that a book leaves is more important than the book itself.”

“Solitude is very beautiful... when you have someone to tell it to.”

“Love is a chaos of light and shadows. Woman, an amalgam of perjury and tenderness. Man, an abyss of greatness and smallness.”

“The spectacle of beauty, in whatever form it appears, raises the mind to noble aspirations.”

“What a shame that love has no dictionary in which to ascertain when pride is simply pride and when it is dignity!”

“He who has imagination, with what ease he creates a world from nothing.”

“In politics , love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well”

“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. On Revolution (1963), ch. 2”

“Niemand hat das Recht zu gehorchen.”

“Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians. Men in Dark Times”

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. The New Yorker”

“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good? The good is no longer even being measured. Interview with French writer Roger Errera in New York Review of Books”

“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good. The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking”

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. As quoted in The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989) edited by Robert Andrews, p. 114”

“I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi . Speaking of her book The Human Condition , as quoted in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) by Elisabeth Young”

“Martin Heidegger at Eighty,”

“I prayed all night long for my master. Till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me. I changed my prayer. First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way'. As quoted in Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1971), by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, pp. 14”

“I can't die but once. As quoted in The Underground Railroad (1987) by Charles L. Blockson”

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say”

“I looked at my hands , to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory over everything, de sun came like gold trou de trees , and over de fields, and I felt like I was in heaven . On realizing that she had passed out of the slavery states into the northern states”

“Modernized rendition: I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came up like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.”

“I knew of a man who was sent to the State Prison for twenty”

“Oh, Lord! You've been wid me in six troubles, don't desert me in the seventh! Modernized rendition: Oh, Lord! You've been with me in six troubles, don't desert me in the seventh!”

“The phrase " Liberty or Death " is a slogan made famous during the independence struggle of several countries.”

“but offers no citation. No source from earlier than 1993 is known. Quoted in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999) by Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah, p. 299. Tubman specialists like Jean H. Humez and Kate Clifford Larson deem this one completely spurious. See”

“Harriet Tubman never said this”

“I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, … " In a letter from Naoko, Norwegian Wood”

“write about a particular subject in a particular way,”

“The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up only of the first”