Words to Live By
A curated collection of powerful quotes that inspire, challenge, and resonate—selected by Daniel Millsap.
“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
— Rosa Parks
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
— Alice Walker
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
— Albert Camus
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
“If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, we do not believe in it at all.”
— Noam Chomsky
“States are not moral agents; they are vehicles of power…”
— Noam Chomsky
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.”
— Groucho Marx
“Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries — a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends. The system can afford to deal with scandal in order to regenerate itself through public confession, transparency, and moral reinforcement — in fact, it needs scandal in order to function.”
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood… teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadelle
“The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislative is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making: whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.”
— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690)
Quod si nihil cum potentiore juris humani relinquitur inopi, at ego ad Deos vindices humanae superbiae confugiam: et precabor ut iras suas vertant in eos, quibus non suae res, non alienae satis sint, quorum saevitiam non mors noxiorum exaciat: placari nequeant, nisi hauriendum sanguinem laniandaque viscera nostra praebuerimus.
— Titus Livius (Livy), Ab Urbe Condita, Liber IX, Caput I
“The stateless person, the one without papers, ceased to be a human being in any meaningful political sense.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
“When the church binds itself to power, it must share in the guilt of that power’s violence.”
— Leonardo Boff, Church: Charism and Power (1981)
“The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.”
— Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (1971)
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more…’”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §341 (“The Greatest Weight”)