The Impossible Takes Longer (13 page)

Authors: David Pratt

BOOK: The Impossible Takes Longer

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Attributed remark in 1917 to a colleague who was ten minutes late due to shooting in the streets during the Russian Revolution

747. A love affair, a career, a revolution: these are ventures on which one embarks without knowing their outcome.

Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE, 1964

748. Research in applied science leads to reforms, research in pure science leads to revolutions, and revolutions, whether political or industrial, are exceedingly profitable things if you are on the winning side.

J. J. Thomson
PHYSICS, 1906

749. No matter how valid the ideas that inspire a party, no matter how wise its program, no matter how strong the initial support from the people, sooner or later there will be an inevitable degeneration of a revolutionary party into a conservative party.

Mikhail Gorbachev
PEACE, 1990

750. I renounce revolution as a means of solving problems.

Mikhail Gorbachev
PEACE, 1990

TERRORISM

751. The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which he fights.

Yasser Arafat
PEACE, 1994

752. Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

753. If those vested with authority and power practice injustice, resort to torture and killing, is it not inevitable that those who are the victims will react with similar methods?

Seán MacBride
PEACE, 1974

754. As long as the more powerful nations exploit the less powerful, they will be repaid by terrorism, hatred, and potential violence. Insofar as our policies are selfish or cynical or short-sighted, there will inevitably be a day of reckoning.

Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002

755. The first step towards the dethronement of terror is the deflation of its hypocritical self-righteousness.

Wole Soyinka
LITERATURE, 1986

FREEDOM

756. So listen to me, children: Put on your marching shoes; don'cha get weary; though the path ahead may be dark and dreary; we're walking for freedom, children.

Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964

757. Freedom is not a philosophy, nor is it even an idea. It is a movement of consciousness that leads us, at certain moments, to utter one of two monosyllables: Yes or No.

Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990

758. None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938

759. Peace is indissolubly interwoven with the question of freedom, for peace without freedom is a mockery.

Albert Lutuli
PEACE, i960

760. For my own part I have made my choice. I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through hardship, sacrifice, and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.

Nelson Mandela
PEACE, 1993

761. Nothing, not even the most sophisticated weapon, not even the most brutally efficient policy, no, nothing will stop people once they are determined to achieve their freedom and their right to humanness.

Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984

762. People are not free if they cannot decide where they wish to live; where they wish to work; where and how they wish to educate their children; where and how they wish to worship; what language they wish to speak; to what organisations they wish to belong; or what views they choose to hold. It is precisely because apartheid denied these basic freedoms that it was so unacceptable and had to be dismantled.

F. W. de Klerk
PEACE, 1993

763. A society that puts equality . . . ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality or freedom.

Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976

764. Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

Woodrow Wilson
PEACE, 1919

765. When a nation re-awakens, its finest sons are prepared to give their lives for its liberation. When Empires are threatened with collapse, they are prepared to sacrifice their non-commissioned officers.

Menachem Begin
PEACE, 1978

JUSTICE

766. For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.

Wole Soyinka
LITERATURE, 1986

767. From the moment that the free-thinkers began to question the existence of God, the problem of justice became of primary importance.

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

768. God help us if our sense of fair play is not the strongest of all our feelings.

Bjornstjene Bjørnson
LITERATURE, 1903

769. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964

770. Freedom without social justice is useless, and social justice is useless in the absence of individual freedoms.

Shirin Ebadi
PEACE, 2003

771. Any peace not built on justice and on the recognition of the rights of the peoples, would be a structure of sand which would crumble under the first blow.

Anwar al-Sadat
PEACE, 1978

772. If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.

Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973

773. Power alone is no guarantee of security . . . The only guarantee of security is justice.

Naguib Mahfouz
LITERATURE, 1988

774. The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

775. Even those who are fed up with morality ought to realize that it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them even to win wars.

Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957

RACISM

776. Racism is evil—human damnation in the Old Testament sense, and no compromises, as well as sacrifices, should be too great in the fight against it.

Nadine Gordimer
LITERATURE, 1991

777
.
No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

Nelson Mandela
PEACE, 1993

778. We don't want apartheid improved—we want it removed, we want it dismantled. You can't reform apartheid.

Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984

779. To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949

780. "I know what every colored woman in this country is doing." "What's that?" "Dying."

Toni Morrison
LITERATURE, 1993

781. If Hider had won the war and established his thousand-year Reich . . . the first 200 years of that Reich would have been exacdy what that period was in this country for Black people.

Toni Morrison
LITERATURE, 1993

782. In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

Toni Morrison
LITERATURE, 1993

783. The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

André Gide
LITERATURE, 1947

MARXISM AND COMMUNISM

784. If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Mikhail Gorbachev
PEACE, 1990

On a visit to the Reading Room of the British Museum, where Karl Marx wrote
Das Kapital

785. Whatever culture it has overlain—whether Russian, Chinese, or Cuban—Marxism has proven itself economically unworkable and has perverted its underlying just social core by showing itself to be infinitely corruptible.

Roald Hoffmann
CHEMISTRY, 1981

786. Everyone can see how Communism rots the soul of a nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

787. We are dealing not with the tyranny of an individual but with the tyranny of a party that simply has put the production of tyrants on an industrial footing.

Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987

On the Communist regime

788. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953

789. What is called "communism" in developing countries is hunger becoming articulate.

JohnBoydOrr
PEACE, 1949

790. In spring 1942 I was sent to the front near Witebsk and two months later taken prisoner by the Russians . . . I became tolerably fluent in Russian and got quite friendly with some Russians, mostly doctors. I had the occasion to observe the striking parallels between the psychological effects of Nazi and of Marxist education. It was then that I began to realize the nature of indoctrination as such.

Konrad Lorenz
MEDICINE, 1973

791. Human geneticists are particularly vulnerable to the vilification of doctrinaire Marxists because, as scientists, they are in thrall to such bourgeois superstitions as the desirability of telling the truth.

Peter Medawar
MEDICINE, i960

792. This solemn pledge to abstain from truth was called socialist realism.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970

793. For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970

794. Marxism may be discredited in Eastern Europe, but it still seems to flourish at Harvard.

Max Perutz
CHEMISTRY, 1962

795. Marxism became a posture in the 1980s, which enabled very stupid people to pretend they had a coherent view of the world.

V. S. Naipaul
LITERATURE, 2001

796. I have often had to smile at the childish nonsense about cornmunism uttered by some leading English physicists, who were sentimentally biased in favor of this doctrine, about the application of which I have had a firsthand knowledge.

Albert Szent-Györgyi
MEDICINE, 1937

PATRIOTISM