Quotes — Nancy Weinberg-A Celebration

I collect inspiring, infuriating, funny, deadly-serious, culture changing quotes.

For all the years she was an unwilling nursing home “inmate” as she typified herself and her co-residents, I called her three times or more every day. Sometimes I would read her from my 190+ pages of quotes. These were some of her favorites.

Several times I printed these and others and attached them to the walls in her room and to her refrigerator surrounding her with quotes from her friends and heroes.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the while we long to move the stars to pity.”
—Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

According to Agnes de Mille:

“I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy.
I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that
I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly,” “‘There is a vitality, a life force,
an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because
there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.’”
from The Life and Work of Martha Graham

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
—Mario Savio Berkeley Free Speech Movement 1964

“Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
—Dr. Seuss

“Keep fighting for justice and freedom, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it.”
—Molly Ivins

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
—Muriel Rukeyser, “Käthe Kollwitz”

Act my age?
What the fuck is that, “act my age”?
What do I care how old I am?
The Ocean is old as fuck.
It will still drown your ass with vigor.
—Author Unknown

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance,
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
—Ogden Nash

“I am not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star.”
—Sojourner Truth, 1797?-1883

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

“A Criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation.”
—Clarence Darrow

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
—Edward Abbey

“Permit me to say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous,
that the true revolutionary is motivated by feelings of love.”
—Che Guevara

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”
—George Bernard Shaw

“Generally speaking, I don’t believe in kindly humor. I don’t think it exists.
One of the most shameful utterances to stem from the human mouth is Will Rogers’ ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’ The absolute antithesis is Oscar Wilde on the fox-hunting Englishman: ‘The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.’
Wildes’ remark contains, in briefest span, the truth, whereas Rogers’ is pure flatulence, crowd-pleasing, and fake humility.”
—S. J. Perelman

From Walking Words by Eduardo Galeano

The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.

“They can see everything they want to, but never forget that they cannot see beyond the distortion of their imagination where there is no color and everything exists in black and white. And that is why we will survive, because they do not have what is necessary to defeat us. The real war is between our imagination and theirs, what we can see and what they are blinded to.
Do not despair. None of them can see far enough, and so long as we do not let them violate our imagination we will survive. If they cut out my tongue I can write. If they smash my hands, I can draw pictures in the dust with a stick held between my teeth.
Who has the power?”
—from Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it;
while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
—Eugene Debs
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?”
—Don Marquis
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“Hope gleams in the idiot heart.”
—Mayakovski
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.”
—Richard Brinsley Sheridan
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”
—James Thurber
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man.”
—Ernesto “Che” Guevara
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?”
A saying of Rabbi Hillel
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“We need to laugh a lot to create a new world, because if we don’t, our new world will turn out square and it won’t go round.”
—Subcomandante Marcos
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“Jewish humor is deep in sentiment and sluiced with sarcasm. Jewish humor loves the ruminative because it rests on a very sad and rueful past. It favors paradox because it knows only paradox can do justice to the injustices of life. It adores irony because the only way the Jews could retain their sanity was to view a dreadful and threatening world with sardonic eyes. The humor of the Jews swings between derision and schmaltz.”
—Leo Rosten, The World Of Jewish Humor
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“If I could only write I’d write a nasty letter to the Mayor if he could only read.”
—A Bug (in Pogo)
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“…the very mark of the intellectual Jews—the disputatious stance, the aggressively marginal sensibility, the disavowal of community ties, the taste for scrutinizing a social event as though it were a dream or a work of art.”
—Nathan Zuckerman, Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“It comes from the feeling that, as a Jew and a person, you don’t fit into the mainstream of American society. It comes from the realization that even if you are better and smarter, you’ll never belong.”
—Mel Brooks on the link between Jews and comedy •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“I am Jewish in the residual sense of only half belonging. I deeply distrust Israel and Zionism and I have a loathing of all monotheistic religions.” In other words, as he claimed in Beyond the Fringe: “In face, I’m not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog, you know.”
—Jonathan Miller
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Few people knew it at the time that Canadian Beatrice Lillie was the wife of England's Sir Robert Peel, 5th Baronet of Tamworth and mother to Sir Robert Peel, 6th Baronet of Tamworth.

Once Beatrice Lillie was having her hair coiffed at Elizabeth Arden in Chicago when the wife of the founder of the Armour meat-packing company entered, noticed her, and complained loudly that she didn't realize there would be chorus girls present or she would not have come. Soon thereafter, as Lillie was leaving and saying goodbye to the manageress in the waiting room, she said, “You may tell the butcher's wife that Lady Peel has finished.”
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

MALCOLM X’S EULOGY

Eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis at the funeral of Malcolm X

Faith Temple Church Of God February 27,1965

“Here — at this final hour, in this quiet place — Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes -extinguished now, and gone from us forever. For Harlem is where he worked and where he struggled and fought — his home of homes, where his heart was, and where his people are — and it is, therefore, most fitting that we meet once again — in Harlem — to share these last moments with him. For Harlem has ever been gracious to those who have loved her, have fought for her, and have defended her honor even to the death.

It is not in the memory of man that this beleaguered, unfortunate, but nonetheless proud community has found a braver, more gallant young champion than this Afro-American who lies before us—unconquered still. I say the word again, as he would want me to: Afro-American — Afro-American Malcolm, who was a master, was most meticulous in his use of words. Nobody knew better than he the power words have over minds of men. Malcolm had stopped being a ‘Negro’ years ago. It had become too small, too puny, too weak a word for him. Malcolm was bigger than that. Malcolm had become an Afro-American and he wanted — so desperately — that we, that all his people, would become Afro-Americans too.

There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain — and we will smile. Many will say turn away — away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man—and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate — a fanatic, a racist — who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say to them : Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him.

Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves. Last year, from Africa, he wrote these words to a friend: ‘My journey’, he says, ‘is almost ended, and I have a much broader scope than when I started out, which I believe will add new life and dimension to our struggle for freedom and honor and dignity in the States. I am writing these things so that you will know for a fact the tremendous sympathy and support we have among the African States for our Human Rights struggle. The main thing is that we keep a United Front wherein our most valuable time and energy will not be wasted fighting each other.’ However we may have differed with him — or with each other about him and his value as a man — let his going from us serve only to bring us together, now.

Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man — but a seed — which, after the winter of our discontent, will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is — a Prince — our own black shining Prince! — who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”

“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”
—Che Guevara

”Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“It is a terrible, and inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.”
—From Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

A great thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after the fact and reason.”
—John Keats

Contact