Adversity Quotes

"is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinity of emotion: rage, grief of guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope? Could it really be true that my mother has been given no door number four or five or six or even seven to walk through in order to know the wholeness of motherhood? Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief?"

- Patrisse Khan-Cullors

"Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!"

- Robert Burns

"Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist."

- Edmund Burke

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

- Mark Twain

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry."

- John Webster

""I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, when his wing is bruised and his bosom sore; when he beats his bars and he would be free, it is not a carol of joy or glee, but a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core.""

- John Berry

"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country … it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of the civil government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. … All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it."

- Alexis de Tocqueville

"Nothing is so irresistible as the tyrannical power commanding in the name of the people, because while wielding the moral power which belongs to the will of the greater number, it acts at the same time with the quickness and persistence of a single man."

- Alexis de Tocqueville

"Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid."

- Bob Dylan

"Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa!"

- Allen Ginsberg

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."

- Robert M. Hutchins

"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."

- Robert H. Jackson

"Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism and we have no chain to it."

- Robert H. Jackson

"The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied."

- Otto Kahn

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

- Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864

"Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep."

- Rosa Luxemburg

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

- James Madison

"The tyranny of a prince is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."

- Montesquieu

"In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me … and by that time, there was no one to speak up for anyone."

- Martin Niemöller

"Whenever war is declared, truth is the first casualty."

- Arthur Ponsonby

"For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government. The nation looked to government but the government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that government is best which is most indifferent. For nearly four years you have had an administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob."

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

- George Bernard Shaw

"However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four."

- Gloria Steinem

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

- Harry S. Truman

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."

- John Adams

"If as a nation we are split into warring camps, if we teach our citizens not to look upon one another as brothers but as enemies divided… surely we shall fail and our great democratic experiment on this continent will go down in crushing overthrow."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men."

- Seneca

"The point is not to wish for these adversities, but for the virtue that makes adversities bearable."

- Seneca

"Difficulties show a person's character."

- Epictetus