I've always had a knack for using other people's words to help make my point. The following are just some of the words I've come across which I find relevant to the issue.
Quotes on Custom/Tradition/Habit:
"Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity."
--George Bernard Shaw
"Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and
destroy."
--Henri de Lubac
"As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue
to commit atrocities."
--Voltaire
"Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the
harder it is to get rid of it."
--Mark Twain
"[A] long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a
superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a
formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon
subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."
--Thomas Paine, Common Sense
"We are more sensible of what is done against custom than
against nature."
--Plutarch
"Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always
first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the
law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was
accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats
almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became
good men!"
--Frederich Nietzsche
"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and
noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean."
--George Santayana
"He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils;
for time is the great innovator."
--Francis Bacon
"Quick decisions are unsafe decisions."
--Sophocles
"Habit with him was all the test of truth;
'It must be right, I've done it from my youth.'
--George Crabbe
"Habit is a great deadener."
--Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Quotes on Children:
"What's done to children they will do to society."
--Karl Menniger
"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for
its children."
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take
them and love them as God gives them to us."
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of
that child's world and thus a world event."
--Gaston Bachelard
"What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to
the coffin."
--Henry Ward Beecher
"Men are more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs
than of their children."
--William Penn
"Oh what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that
their children are naïve."
--Ogden Nash
"If you bungle raising your children I don't think whatever
else you do matters."
--Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They came through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."
--Kahlil Gibran, On Children
Quotes on the Body:
"The body is a sacred garment. It is your first and last
garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart
life with, and it should be treated with honor."
--Martha Graham
"Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that,
it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it
defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by
encumbering it with remedies."
--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
"The trouble about always trying to preserve the health of
the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying
the health of the mind."
--G. K. Chesterton
"As the body is prior in order of generation to the soul, so the
irrational is prior to the rational. The proof is that anger and
wishing and desire are implanted in children from their very
birth, but reason and understanding are developed as they
grow older. Wherefore, the care of the body ought to precede
that of the soul, and the training of the appetitive part should
follow; none the less our care of it must be for the sake of the
reason, and our care of the body for the sake of the soul."
--Aristotle
"We live in a atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of
everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, or
our relatives, or our incomes, of our accents, or our
opinions, or our experience, just as we are ashamed of our
naked skins."
--George Bernard Shaw
"If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred."
--Walt Whitman
Quotes on Conformity:
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it's time to pause and reflect."
--Mark Twain
"Commandment #1 of any truly civilized society is this: Let
people be different."
--David Grayson
"Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the
modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing
security of being identified with the majority."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the right to
be free."
--Anonymous
Quotes on Medicine:
"Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from
doing harm."
--Hippocrates
"We shall have to learn to refrain from doing things merely because
we know how to do them."
--Theodore Fox, Spech to Royal Physicians
"Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong
the situation with least harm to the patient."
--Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary
"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know
little to cure diseases of which they know less in human
beings of whom they know nothing."
--Voltaire
"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine;
now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
--Thomas Szasz
"The remedy is worse than the disease."
--Francis Bacon
"Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit - Life!"
--Emily Dickinson
Quotes on Fear/Lies
"The cruelest lies are often told in silence."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
"Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence"
--Aristotle
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main
sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of
wisdom."
--Bertrand Russell
Quotes on Religion:
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they
do it from religious conviction."
--Blaise Pascal
"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a
literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."
--Anaïs Nin
"To what excess will men not go for the sake of a religion
in which they believe so little and which they practice so
imperfectly!"
--Jean de La Bruyere
"The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and
commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to
the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a
village of God's empire but it is not the immutable universal
law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made
useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased
religion and making way for truth."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that somewhere, someone might
be happy."
--H.L. Mencken
Quotes on Violence:
"This was the most unkindest cut of all."
--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists.
That is why they invented Hell."
--Bertrand Russell
"All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power,
but the absence of power."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quotes on Education/Activism:
"All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed.
Then it is violently opposed.
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident."
--Arthur Schoepenhauer
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing
that ever has."
--Margaret Mead
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions
of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn
of day."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve
the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends
forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a
million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples
build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of
oppression and resistance."
--Robert F. Kennedy
"It's not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their
opinions about the facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can
only make them right by discussion."
--Sir Norman Angell
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"What history teaches us is that men have never learned
anything from it."
--Georg Wilhelm Hegel
"It is never too late to give up your prejudices."
--Henry David Thoreau
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new
landscapes, but in having new eyes."
--Marcel Proust
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a
single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
A quote to remember when debating:
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that
I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Back to Yuki's Intactivism Resource
