Causes Quotes

“I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you want to discover the true character of a person, you have only to observe what they are passionate about.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Emotional predictive profiling may help identify contingent fissures in the stature of endangered relationships. Still and all, it might be wise to let the genie out of problematic bottles in the first place, in advance of scouting the causes of surreptitious subliminal convulsions. ("Beware of the neighbor")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Real women fight for something, other than their own emotions.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“It is the apathetic person that sees the cause while the charitable person sees the need.”
― Shannon L. Alder, 300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It's Too Late

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.

The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.”
― John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

“You can't fight hatred with hatred and expect anyone to listen to you. You can only try to lessen it with humor, wit, truth and commonsense. If that doesn't work run like hell, while they throw rocks at you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.”
― Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth

“Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Them fellers was dangerous, but for the simple reason they had a cause. Ain't no worse thing in the world than fronting up against one of those, for a man with a cause, right or wrong, has got plenty to prove, and will make you suck sorrow if you get in the way of 'em wrongly.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

“This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.... Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.”
― George Packer

“...the greater objective (representative) perfection there is in our idea of a thing, the greater also must be the perfection of its cause.”
― René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy

“Being in the right has got nothing to do with courage or exceptional bravery. The forces of evil will fight just as enthusiastically or fiercely as the armies of righteousness.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Cuckold

“Brave people are persuaded to an action when it is represented as more dangerous than it is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Self-oriented people are inclusive only of those they believe will further their own motives and causes. More evolved people understand that inclusivity is the most productive and positive way to be. As such, their endeavours are life-enhancing, successful, and significantly contributory. Truly inclusive people do not gossip, listen to gossip, seek to pull other people down, view competition as a play of personal power, or try to gain benefit from someone else’s suffering. Instead, their eyes, mind, and talents are directed towards whatever is best for everyone in any given situation.”
― Donna Goddard, Touched by Love

“[D]uring all my university years in the U.S. (doing a master’s and a doctorate degrees), I often noticed that young people were totally quiet when issues like wars and crimes against humanity in the Middle East came up, but they were very active and vocal when issues like recycling, environment, or global warming came up. While all these issues are important, the silences and complicity displayed on some issues rather than others; the selectivity of expressing resistance and rage are hypocritical, to say the least. I found that many choose to be active in what one could consider safe and convenient causes. How can I take seriously enraged rich and privileged students who want us to protect the environment by recycling a plastic bottle, yet it never occurs to them that all the bombs and weapons used in the Middle East are doing a serious damage to their beloved planet? Last time I checked we all live on one planet, unless these privileged students truly live on a different planet.”
― Louis Yako

“But political passions are like all the rest, they do not last. New generations arise which no longer understand them; even the generation that experienced them changes, experiences new political passions which, not being modelled exactly upon their predecessors, rehabilitate some of the excluded, the reason for exclusion having altered.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“A damaged brain and body is an opportunity to research the root causes and treatments.”
― Steven Magee

“Someone who'd starved in the camps, who'd lied her way into the hearts and beds of good people, who'd tricked and tortured to betray a cause she halfway believed in for the sake of one she didn't at all, might've felt a little bitter at seeing all this money wasted.”
― Joe Abercrombie, A Little Hatred

“Since the second world war, there has been a ratcheting up of global tensions and it is now time to address the root causes.”
― Steven Magee

“If we fail today, we might as well throw in the towel.
My ears hammer against the roarin’ crowd. We must stop the rallying call for a Nazi Party in America. The last thing we need in the middle of the Depression is a fascist party here to support the one the Nazis are building in Germany. Everyone’s still nursin’ their wounds from the Great War.”
― Leslie K. Barry, Newark Minutemen

“I adopted a policy of continuous change to discover the underlying causes of my disabling sickness.”
― Steven Magee

“There are causes for the birth and reasons for the death of someone. You have to turn the pages of your life to understand the causes for the death and meditate to know the reasons for your birth.”
― Lokesh Umak

“Bright Light Adaptation Disease may occur in high altitude workers due to the accelerated aging effects that increased radiation causes.”
― Steven Magee

“The causes always show themselves as angels against actions.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“There are those dubious causes that destroy our lives, all the while leading us to believe that the murder was sacrifice.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“People have started noticing where they live causes their health conditions! When they leave the area for a prolonged period, they become healthy again.”
― Steven Magee

“Rumblings of thunder warn us lightning may occur. Crashing thunder tells us lightning has occurred.”
― Aegelis, Specks of Shadows, Flecks of Light