Call To Arms Quotes

I would prove to you that being different isn't a death sentence but a call to arms. ~ Jodi Picoult

Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortable as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether - to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteeen-year-olds you no doubt revile - there is a point to it all. ~ John Green

Art is made by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn't art. And of course it is loved as consolation, or a call to arms, by those who feel the same. One of the reasons there seem to be fewer readers for literature today than there were yesterday is that the concept of failure has been outlawed. If we are all beautiful, all clever, all happy, all successes in our way, what do we want with the language of the dispossessed? But the nature of failure ensures that writers will go on writing no matter how many readers they have. You have to master the embarrassments and ignominies of life. ~ Howard Jacobson

My little donkey, if I hadn't shown up, your fate would have been sealed. Love has saved you. Is there anything else that could erase the innate fears of a donkey and send him to rescue you from certain death? No. That is the only one. With a call to arms, I, Ximen Donkey, charged down the ridge and headed straight for the wolf that was tailing my beloved. My hooves kicked up sand and dust as I raced down from my commanding position; no wolf, not even a tiger, could have avoided the spearhead aimed at it. It saw me too late to move out of the way, and I thudded into it, sending it head over heels. Then I turned around and said to my donkey, Do not fear my dear, I am here! ~ Mo Yan

smokey eye eyeliner as defiance. eyeliner as a statement, a declaration, a fuck you to a society that shames people for expressing themselves the way they feel the most at home, the same society that labels everything from toys to toothbrushes "boy" and "girl" rather than letting individuals cultivate their own identities. eyeliner as a call to arms. eyeliner as a weapon, a raised fist, a shield from judgmental expressions and microaggressions disguised as questions, from the insults and slurs shot out of car windows like bullets in a drive-by because i dare exist in a way they don't and refuse to understand. ~ Cyrus Parker

This isn't happening to you, princess," Sabine snapped before I could do more than shake my head. "This is happening to us. While you spent the past few months prancing around in ignorant bliss, we were all being possessed, or kidnapped, or stalked by this hellion. So dry your tears and take off the tiara, because this is a call to arms, not a pity party. You're not going to find any sympathy here. ~ Rachel Vincent

I appeal to all Britishers to answer this call to arms for the defence of all the principles that we Englishmen have been the first to proclaim in the world. ~ John Amery

It was, as the song said, 'call to arms music,' and seemed to have little to do with Scotland and New Year. It was fighting music. Stevie didn't want to fight anyone. But it was also beautiful music. ~ Irvine Welsh

There is no greater will on earth than the will to survive. These fine people, answering my father's call to arms, had the will in spades and droves.
- Lord Tristan Dracanburh, Ethandun ~ Alexandra May

I want my photos to be fresh and urgent. A good photograph should be a call to arms. ~ Terry Richardson

So Justo comes to listen. The language always has been the most important act of separation anyway, as the bond is to the words more than to the land. Since nothing on maps reflects their existence, the extent of their "country" is the range of their language. But like the dances, the flag, and the celebrations, the words are banned, making a prayer whispered in Basque as illegal as a call to arms in the public square. ~ Dave Boling

Nova Express begins with the blistering Last Words of the mysterious Hassan i Sabbah because time is running out: the book is not just a call-to-arms against those who brought us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mentioned several times, but a manifesto for global resistance against the 1 percent who run our planet like an alien colony.
--Oliver Harris, Introduction William S. Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text ~ William S. Burroughs

Honor Lost

Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ... ~ Muse

I was so upset with what was going on in the world. I just couldn't stand the idea of being people tortured and that we even had such a thing as war. I hated the older generation, who had not done anything about it. Punk was a call-to-arms for me. ~ Vivienne Westwood

Just when you thought multi-nationals and crazed consumerism were too big to fight, along comes Naomi Klein with facts, spirit, and news of successful fighters already out there. No Logo is an invigorating call to arms for everybody who wants to save money, justice, or the universe. ~ Gloria Steinem

Sometimes you characters give me a pain in the back of my lap," said Manuel abruptly. "I hang around with you and listen to simple-minded gobbledegook in yard-long language, if it's you talking, Dran, and pink-and-purple sissification from the brat here. Why I do it I'll never know. And it goes that way up to the last gasp. So you're going to leave. Dran has to make a speech, real logical. Vaughn has to blow out a sigh and get misty-eyed." He spat.
"How would you handle it?" Dran asked, amused. Vaughn stared at Manuel whitely.
"Me? You really want to know?"
"This I want to hear," said Vaughn between her teeth.
"I'd wait a while - a long while - until neither of you was talking. Then I'd say, 'I joined the Marines yesterday.' And you'd both look at me a little sad. There's supposed to be something wrong with coming right out and saying something. Let's see. Suppose I do it the way Vaughn would want me to." He tugged at an imaginary braid and thrust out his lower lip in a lampoon of Vaughn's full mouth. He sighed gustily. "I have felt …" He paused to flutter his eyelashes. "I have felt the call to arms," he said in a histrionic whisper. He gazed off into the middle distance. "I have heard the sound of trumpets. The drums stir in my blood." He pounded his temples with his fists. "I can't stand it - I can't! Glory beckons. I will away to foreign strands."
Vaughn turned on her heel, though she made no effort to walk away. Dran roared with laughter.
"A ~ Theodore Sturgeon

This is what we call smart power. Using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security. Leaving no one on the sidelines. Showing respect even for one's enemies. Trying to understand, in so far as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view. Helping to define the problems, determine the solutions. ~ Hillary Clinton

The Second Amendment's language and historical and philosophical background demonstrated that it was designed to guarantee individuals the possession of certain kinds of arms for three purposes: (1) crime prevention or what we would today describe as self-defense; (2) national defense; and (3) preservation of individual liberty ... ~ Don Kates

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.
Ideas come and go, stories stay. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It's easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie-all just by thinking. Astronauts of the future may use the power of their minds to pilot their spaceships or explore distant planets. Cities may rise from the desert of Mars, all due to master builders who mentally control the work of robots. ~ Michio Kaku

We could call the second problem with the current Sabbath vogue the fallacy of the direct object. Whom is the contemporary Sabbath designed to honor? Whom does it benefit? In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him. ~ Lauren F. Winner

The things I was allowed to experience, the people I was able to call friends, teammates, mentors, coaches and opponents, the travel, all of it, are far more than anything I ever thought possible in my lifetime. ~ Curt Schilling

What led to September 11 is that most decision makers in the White House thought like you. They supported despotic regimes in the Middle East to multiply the profits of oil and arms companies, and armed violence escalated and reached our shores. ~ Alaa Al Aswany

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we us ~ Robert Macfarlane

The purpose of prayer and of God's call in your life isn't to make you number one in the world's eyes but to make Him number one in your life. ~ Ravi Zacharias

But, oh, when gloomy doubts prevail,
I fear to call thee mine;
The springs of comfort seem to fail,
And all my hopes decline.
Yet, gracious God, where shall I flee?
Thou art my only trust;
And still my soul would cleave to thee,
Though prostrate in the dust. ~ Anne Steele

When a single cat let loose a war cry, it was an unsettling sound. When two cats suddenly wailed at each other in a similar fashion, it was downright unnerving.
When hundreds of them caterwauled at the same time, in a single voice, the sound alone was enough to make one feel as if the skin had been peeled from one's muscle and bone, to call up horrors inherited from ancestors long since dead and forgotten, raw terror before a deadly predator. ~ Jim Butcher

The telephone is there for your convenience, not for the convenience of your callers. Yet, as soon as we hear the phone ring, we act as if we are firefighters rushing to a five-alarm fire. We run to pick it up as if our lives depended on the call being answered at once. I have seen people interrupt quiet family dinners, dedicated reading times and meditation periods to answer ~ Robin S. Sharma

Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed - although he doesn't know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you're simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back. ~ Jonathan Tropper

In the spirit of commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, we will strive to achieve real progress in disarmament and arms control. ~ Sergei Lavrov

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old
Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly
Contrives. In all creation, be assured,
There is no death - no death, but only change
And innovation; what we men call birth
Is but a different new beginning; death
Is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps
This may have moved to that and that to this,
Yet still the sum of things remains the same.
Nothing can last, I do believe, for long
In the same image. ~ Ovid

As we find our worth and forgiveness at the feet of Jesus, these chains will loosen. We'll be free to run into His loving arms - restored and whole. Not because we're perfect or sinless. But because Jesus saw our flaws and sins and still, He said, "You are worth dying for. ~ Tessa Emily Hall

I have met countless people who call themselves Christians who don't appear to have any living breathing vibrant connection with the resurrected Christ and I've met countless people from every religious background including atheists that tell me of their very personal and real experiences of the living Christ. I don't have people asking me why they should believe something - that's starting off on the wrong foot to say the least. ~ Rob Bell

My client's arrived, I can tell the purr of a Porsche anywhere. It's like the sound of a woman's orgasm
something you never forget."
Turning away, he paused at the archway. "Something for you to work toward with her, Richard. Good luck with that, and call me if you need any instruction. I gave her her first one. ~ J.R. Ward

George you were very very bad to run away from Alice. Very bad But you were very good to stomp Sinclair when he was being a dick so I think we'll call this a wash. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no. ~ James Russell Lowell

Jedediah pulled out his pocketknife, reached over her, and snipped the rose to place in her hair. "Looks better there." In the moonlight, he wasn't sure if she blushed or not. Her eyes seemed all soft and glowing, her lips the color of the pink rose, slightly parted and tempting him. Before he knew what he was doing, his arms had circled her in a swift embrace. Heat filled his face, and his heart pounded so hard he was sure Patience could hear it. Would she let him kiss her? But she was already pulling away, visibly shaken. Her fingers touched her hair, patting it into place, and her eyes, large with surprise, looked into his, then quickly away. "I . . . Jed . . . I think we'd better go back inside and join the party." "I'm - I'm truly sorry, Patience. I don't know . . . I'm not sure what came over me just now. It must be the moonlight and the roses." And you, he said only to himself. ~ Maggie Brendan

I was filming 'The Avengers' when I got the call for 'Rush,' so I went from 215 pounds, which is how much I weigh when I'm playing Thor, down to about 185 pounds to be able to fit into the car. That was all in about four months. ~ Chris Hemsworth

Well, anyhow, the practical outcome of all these damn democratic ideas, is that men of our quality -- yes, damn it! we have a quality -- excuse themselves from the hard and thankless service they owe -- not to the crowd, Dick, but to the race. (Much good it will do is to shirk like that in the long run.) We will not presume, we say, no. We shrug our shoulders and leave the geese, the hungry sheep, the born followers, call them what you will, to the leaders who haven't our scruples. The poor muts swallow those dead old religions no longer fit for human consumption, and we say 'let 'em.' They devour their silly newspapers. They let themselves be distracted from public affairs by games, by gambling, by shows and coronations and every soft of mass stupidity, while the stars in their courses plot against them. We say nothing. Nothing audible. We mustn't destroy the simple faith that is marching them to disaster. We mustn't question their decisions. That wouldn't be democratic. And then we sit here and say privately that the poor riff-raff are failing to adapt themselves to those terrible new conditions -- as if they had had half a chance of knowing how things stand with them. They are shoved about by patriotisms, by obsolete religious prejudices, by racial delusions, by incomprehensible economic forces. Amid a growth of frightful machinery... ~ H.G. Wells

The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. ~ C.S. Lewis

The answer to my thoughts is the loud ripping of my shirt when he tears it straight down my back, yanking it forward around my shoulders and imprisoning my arms in the sleeves.
"I've got you now," he says, breaking the kiss and sounding like a god about to unleash wrath. ~ Poppet

Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham. ~ David Foster Wallace

Comparison will be the number one thing that will keep you from doing what God's calling you to do. He's put a gift and a call and a desire in your heart that is different than anyone else's. And you're wired that way for a reason. ~ Kari Jobe

The British call junzi a "gentleman," no surprise. The Americans have no gentlemen, so they translate junzi as "the superior man." The Germans have no gentlemen either, and "superior man" is reserved, so they call junzi an "edler" meaning a person of noble blood. To sum up, all Europeans call junzi anything but junzi, which is quite a scandal. ~ Thorsten J. Pattberg

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It's a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are. ~ Thomas Keating

What we call birth
Is but a beginning to be something else
Than what we were before; and when we cease
To be that something, then we call it death. ~ Ovid

Some mules just seem to be born with the hee-haw habit. Back home we call those fellows 'Missouri Nightingales'. ~ Maureen Daly

Honest poverty is a gem that even a king might be proud to call his own - but I wish to sell out ~ Mark Twain

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. ~ George Eliot

I was working in a church in Florida as a youth intern, which means I really didn't do much other than staple stuff. I'm from Dallas, Texas, and every time my grandmother would call-she would call me any time of the day-I'd be home answering the phone. She was like, "What do you do all day?" and sarcastically I would say, "Well, I'm trying to chalk off the next year to spend time finding a band name." And she said, "Well mercy me, why don't you get a real job?" I thought, "Wait a minute. That's the perfect name." That kind of freed up my year but that's where the name came from. ~ Bart Millard

The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring - and all of the acts carried out - on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories. All it did was embrace the heavy past with a cool, measured detachment. On the moon there was neither air nor wind. Its vacuum was perfect for preserving memories unscathed. No one could unlock the heart of the moon. Aomame raised her glass to the moon and asked, "Have you gone to bed with someone in your arms lately?"
The moon did not answer.
"Do you have any friends?" she asked.
The moon did not answer.
"Don't you get tired of always playing it cool?"
The moon did not answer. ~ Haruki Murakami

Do you trust me, Pidge?" I asked, a little nervous.
"Yeah, why?"
"C'mere," I said, pulling her against me. I waited for her to protest, but she only froze for a few moments before letting her body melt into mine. Her cheek relaxed against my chest.
Instantly, my eyes felt heavy. Tomorrow I would try to think of a way to postpone her departure, but in that moment, sleeping with her in my arms was the only thing I wanted to do. ~ Jamie McGuire

Does anyone ever get tired of being brave, Prosper?" I put my tiny hand in his.

He squeezed it gently and said," Sure they do little darlin', people get tired of being brave all the time."

"What happens then, Prosper?" I was looking at him now, the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I heard something catch in the back of his throat and he had to clear it before he went on. "Why they call on someone who has some brave left over, that's what they do honey."

"Prosper?"

"Yes Raine?"

"Do you have any brave left over?"

"Little darlin', just so happens I been saving up a bunch of brave just for you. ~ Paula Marinaro

To show mercy is not naïve. To hold out against the end of hope is not stupidity or madness. It is fundamentally human. Of course... We are all doomed; we are all poisoned from our birth by the rot of stars. That does not mean we should succumb...to the seductive fallacy of despair, the dark tide that would drown us. You may think I'm stupid, you may call me a madman and a fool, but at least I stand upright in a fallen world. ~ Rick Yancey

I have not forgotten my story I want to tell Millennial women. I'm still waiting for them all to gather out there. I sent out a request for people to call Millennial that they know. ~ Rush Limbaugh

That mother-"
"Hey, watch what you're about to call the guy standing at your door," Nate says.
"That motherly, wonderful, down-the-hall neighbour of mine. What's wrong with saying that? ~ Ginger Scott