The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Silence is a true friend who never betrays.

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

The best thing about my protest has been to see how more and more people have been coming and getting involved.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

I actually think people generally have an awareness and feel like, ‚Wow, these networks have a lot of information.‘

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

People tell me that they are so hopeful when they see me and other children ‚school-striking,‘ and they say, ‚Oh the children are going to save us.‘ But no, we aren’t. We are too young to be able to do that. We don’t have time to wait for us to grow up and fix this in the future.

I am a strong believer that without justice, there is no peace. No lasting peace, anyway.

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God’s creation, woman, the object of our lust.

I was born realizing the flaws in the criminal justice system.

Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

I don’t think there is a single social issue I haven’t spoken on.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear – and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.

When I was growing up, I wanted to adopt, because I was aware there were kids that didn’t have parents.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

The peasant must always be helped technically, economically, morally and culturally. The guerrilla fighter will be a sort of guiding angel who has fallen into the zone, helping the poor always and bothering the rich as little as possible in the first phases of the war.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

I’ve rarely kept my distance from kind of – I don’t know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, ‚Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.‘

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it’s American or British interests involved.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

Wall Street apparently takes and then forgets, and then comes after the guns of law-abiding American citizens and small businesses.

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

It doesn’t take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.