Pause and Reflect

Four Deep Quotes

Four of our favorite deep quotes. Read 'em and reap.

"All the evidence suggests that we have consistently exaggerated the contributions of technological genius and underestimated the contributions of natural resources. We need [...] something we lost in our haste to remake the world: a sense of limits, an awareness of the importance of earth's resources."
    -- Stewart Udall

"[Sitting Bull] once told Annie Oakley, another one of the Wild West Show's stars, that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. 'The white man knows how to make everything', he said, 'but he does not know how to distribute it.'
    -- from Dee Brown's *Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee*

"Cowardice asks the question: is it safe?
Expediency asks the question: is it politic?
Vanity asks the question: is it popular?
But conscience asks the question: is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular---but one must take it because it is right. One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws---an unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law."
    -- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats, We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
"You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?
    -- Helen Keller, 1911 letter to British suffragist