Human Struggle Quotes

Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time. In World War I it was the munitions industrialists; in World War II it was the psychopathic generals who were said to be guilty. This is passing the buck. The responsibility for wars falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have all the necessary means to avert war in their own hands. In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these same masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anyone else. To stress this guilt on the part of masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously. On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims, means to treat them as small, helpless children. The former is the attitude held by the genuine freedom-fighters; the latter the attitude held by the power-thirsty politicians. ~ Wilhelm Reich

That is why my first and most pressing question seems like such an outright act of mutiny. What I want to know is, since when does making art require participation in any community, beyond the intense participation that the art itself is undertaking? Since when am I not contributing to the community if all I want to do is make the art itself? Isn't the art itself my intimate communication with others, with the world, with the unfolding spectacle of the human struggle as we live and coexist on this earth? ~ Meghan Tifft

He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best. ~ Willa Cather

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who - one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. ~ Carson McCullers

Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things. ~ David Lynch

Almost all good stories are sad because it is the human struggle that engages us readers and listeners the most. To watch characters confront their hardships and uncertainties makes us feel better about our own conflicts and confusions and fears. We have a sense of community, of sympathy, a cleansing sympathy, as Aristotle said, and relief that we are safe in our room only reading the story. A story of sadness, even tragedy, makes us feel, paradoxically, better, as though we are confronting our own conflicts and fears, and have endured. ~ Robert Morgan

Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity? ~ Karl Jacoby

For me, a great fantasy is real people, a world I recognise, human struggle and magic. You've got to have magic to make a fantasy work. But I like my magic to be subtle. I don't want magic coming out of the hands of wizards. I want it to be pervading, sinister somehow. ~ Fiona McIntosh

A lifetime of eating at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil had produced a vision of saints and sinners. My heart ached to embark on a journey of liberation and taste of the Tree of Life where saint and sinner are one in love. Every saint has a story, and all sinners have glorious pages yet to be written. ~ R.J. Blizzard

It's reasonable to try for success. Paradoxically, it's also sane to admit defeat. This excels the coming of the end. And when that tide has crested and broken, it recedes from the shore to leave behind something of principle significance. An artefact borne from the lunatic fight. The human struggle. And I can see myself, not too far into the future, with my hair whipping about in the fray of coastal spray, arching low to pick up that wriggling, billion-limbed nautilus, to hold it to my winter-cold ear, to hear what I could hear. ~ Kirk Marshall

How does it happen that, on the one hand, we all share not just a sense that there is such a thing as justice, but a passion for it, a deep longing that things should be put to rights, a sense of out-of-jointness that goes on nagging and gnawing and sometimes screaming at us - and yet, on the other hand, after millennia of human struggle and searching and love and longing and hatred and hope and fussing and philosophizing, we still can't seem to get much closer to it than people did in the most ancient societies we can discover? ~ N. T. Wright

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot. ~ Anne Rice

It is not cynical to admit that the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! ~ Josiah Bancroft

Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in. ~ Marie Brennan

Then there was Buddha meddling in, telling all of the Hindu, Hebrew, Christian and Islamic gods and demons that they were nothing more than unenlightened fear induced figments of nirvana-starved mortals. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

I've always had a fascination with vampires. It's not that I'm exactly fascinated with the dark side. It's the human struggle with it. How we deal with those two aspects of who we are. We all have those elements. ~ Sheryl Lee

If you are a man of learning, read something classic, a history of the human struggle and don't settle for mediocre verse. ~ Rumi

Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle. ~ David Lynch

The fascist dictator declares that the masses of people are biologically inferior and crave authority, that basically, they are slaves by nature. Hence, a totalitarian authoritarian regime is the only possible form of government for such people. It is significant that all dictators who today plunge the world into misery stem from the suppressed masses of people. They are intimately familiar with this sickness on the part of masses of people. What they lack is an insight into natural processes and development, the will to truth and research, so that they are never moved by a desire to want to change these facts.

On the other hand, the formal democratic leaders made the mistake of assuming that the masses of people were automatically capable of freedom and thereby precluded every possibility of establishing freedom and self-responsibility in masses of people as long as they were in power. They were engulfed in the catastrophe and will never reappear.

Our answer is scientific and rational. It is based on the fact that masses of people are indeed incapable of freedom, but it does not - as racial mysticism does - look upon this incapacity as absolute, innate, and eternal. It regards this incapacity as the result of former social conditions of life and, therefore, as changeable. ~ Wilhelm Reich

The laws against public nudity make no sense. The idea that Jerry Falwell can go topless while Cindy Crawford cannot is an absolute affront to logic, common sense and the 5000 year human struggle for aesthetic taste. ~ Peter McWilliams

But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around
they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late. ~ Ransom Riggs

I had to decide who I was, Night or Day, Human or Vampire. ~ P.A. Ross

What I am proposing this year are not lofty concepts far removed form the daily struggle so of ordinary Georgians. They are proposals that directly effect the lives of the people we serve. ~ Roy Barnes

The greatest flaw of human beings is to remain glued to the inventory of reason. Reason doesn't deal with man as energy. Reason deals with instruments that create energy, but it has never seriously occurred to reason that we are better than instruments: we are organisms that create energy. We are bubbles of energy. ~ Carlos Castaneda

He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land ... who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books ... ~ Michel Faber

Good character is the indispensable condition and chief determinant of happiness, itself the goal of all human doing. The end of all action, individual or collective, is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. ~ Aristotle.

Every Day you should reach out and touch someone ~ Maya Angelou

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

They have never believed us human, but we will prove by our actions today that we are more than tools. Even if we aren't human, we are people. They will never be able to deny us this again. ~ N.K. Jemisin

To swear day and night by media slander will make one a bigger victim than the slandered. It doesn't take much to begin to fear a mere illusion of human badness. ~ Criss Jami

One's sovereignty over the land is expressed most powerfully in the act of banishment. Perhaps the first eviction recorded in human history was Adam and Eve's. ~ Matthew Desmond

I believe, I truly believe, that humans will be living off of this planet, at some point in the future. It's inevitable for us, and it seems like a reasonable and realistic progression for us as a human race. We won't last on this planet - not forever. ~ Andrew J. Feustel

They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. ~ Rebecca Skloot

If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

What is it? Do you want me to stop?" he asked, breathless.
"No, please, be close to me," Stitch whispered, feeling the wetness under his eyelids. He lived in a culture where being tough was the only currency. He didn't even cry when he was alone. Being able to let it out made him just as relieved as having the amazing hot body on top of him. Made him remember he was still human, not a man whose muscles were made out of violence and bones out of fury ~ K.A. Merikan

The God to whom I was introduced as a child was basically a Jewish one: male, fatherly, Anglo-European, bearded, angrily loving, judgmental, righteously indignant,mand frighteningly powerful, not to mention present everywhere and all-knowing. In trying to make sense of this God, man has continued to manufacture and manipulate images of this perceived deity. The images have changed over the centuries, based on the mood of the times. During kind times when harvests were abundant and peace reigned (admittedly rare in the ancient world), God was benevolent. When plpague and famine killed millions, God was portrayed as enraged and vengeful.

To this day, this emotionally infantile God remains in power, a fear-based aberration produced by fevered imaginations, promoted by those who understand how such a deity can be used to gain and consolidate power over believers, and protected by flocks of billions who refuse to question their damning God for fear of their own damnation -- or out of an even greater immediate terror of social and cultural isolation. But I argue that it is PRECISELY this image of God -- an infantile, simplistic, ridiculous notion of the sublime power that underlies the world -- that is destroying civil religion, fueling the rage of the "angry atheist" movement, and pitting science against the spiritual at a time when we should be using every tool within reach to discover what it means to be human -- and divinely human at that. ~ Carlton D. Pearson

My first published novel was 'Mother of Demons,' which is simply 'The High Crusade' standing on its head. Poul Anderson placed his medieval human heroes in a futuristic alien setting; I placed my futuristic human heroes in a bronze age alien setting. ~ Eric Flint

A knowledge both of the factors of evolution and how they operate in human society becomes necessary if we are to develop a sound social order. ~ Conway Zirkle

We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving. ~ J.K. Rowling

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. ~ Aldous Huxley

The important thing to remember is it's not about balance; it's about integration ... to really focus on making sure you're integrating all four aspects of your work, your family, your community and yourself. And it's not about trying to spend equal amounts of time on everything you do each day on each of these things, but making sure you're paying attention to all the things that make it up as a whole human being. ~ Padmasree Warrior

War, this monster of mutual slaughter among men, will be finally eliminated by the progress of human society, and in the not too distant future too. ~ Mao Zedong

Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect. ~ Rene Girard

If someone was to tally the number of human hours wasted in business by people trying to accomplish objectives without being given the authority to do so, we would all be appalled. ~ Laurie Beth Jones

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues ... ~ Freya Stark

...If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky way. properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.

"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? ~ Mark Twain

you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for "personal intercourse," substituted the safer "personal influence," and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.
Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life's duties. But here is a subject in which we must
inevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie's line, so he abandoned these
subjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy. ~ E. M. Forster

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge. ~ Tom Stoppard

The strength of human instinct seems to be quite overrated as it is so feeble it requires a lifetime of guidance, education, training and practical experience to develop. More critically, without conscious and diligent effort across one generation to pass its knowledge on to the next generation, all that was gained will be lost, forewarned by an increasing rarity of the reminiscence, "Every secret of life I know, I learned at my grandfather's knee. ~ T.K. Naliaka

I think the actresses who are really successful are the ones who are comfortable in their own skins and still look human. ~ Emma Watson

It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. ~ Anne Frank

Mathematics is an art of human understanding. ~ William Thurston

But in the darkness of her room he was reminded that helplessness was often a portal to God, because rarely did the fragile, self-serving human pray for things in his complete control. ~ Rene Gutteridge

The moral crisis she'd just gone through made her feel indulgent toward the faults, the delinquencies of others. How thoroughly a human being can be buffeted and over-mastered by fate had been borne in upon her with appalling force. ~ Emmuska Orczy

Your eyes drooled. I saw them."
He was totally perplexed by this argument. Was he not allowed to speak to anyone? "I'm wearing dark sunglasses. How can you see my eyes?"
"She's jealous, Seth."
He looked at Maahes for an explanation. "Why?"
Lydia broke off into her hand gestures.
"Are you yelling at me, now?"
Maahes laughed. "Oh yeah, kid. She's calling you a lot of names."
That surprised him. "You understand her?"
Maahes gestured back at Lydia in the same language.
For some reason, it angered and hurt him that they'd cut him out of the conversation. "Are you mocking me?"
Lydia flicked her nails at him, then turned and stormed off.
Seth had no idea what he should do. He didn't understand human emotions or relations. Not really. It'd been too long since he had any.
Maahes let out a heavy sigh. "You hurt her feelings, boy. You need to go apologize."
"How did I hurt them?"
"Think about it, Seth. She risked her life to bring you here, to save you from hell, and what do you do the first minute she leaves you alone? You let another woman flirt with you. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

But then his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word, - or at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle with 'Ran away from the subscriber' under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,
the imploring human eye, frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,
these he had never tried. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe