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It was nothing to him that his own caste shot out the lip and scorned him. Cold and awkward in manner, regular and austere in habit, and as pure as a good woman, of course they hated him. But it was much to him that the clergy who ruled the people were also his foes, that that very people themselves were so dull and hopeless, that they too suspected his motives and concluded that because for them every change had always been for the worse, every change always would be. Slowly, gradually, he gained the favour of the priest and the love of the flock. He could not turn their hell into heaven: he could not make earth at all what Condorcet, uplifted in noble vision, would dream it yet might be. But he could do something.
--
Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 8: Turgot: The Statesman

 

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

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I've been 15 years in the nut ward, for trying to stop the trees from being cut down, from trying to rearrange the lifestyle of a bunch of people who don't want to change. But they're gonna change because a cold wind is blowing. You're gonna change or else there's going to be no life left on the planet Earth.

 

Charles Manson

 

The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men. Pacifists have sometimes evaded that truth as making too great a concession to Mars, as seeming to imply (which it does not in fact) that in order to abolish war, men must cease to be noble.
Base motives are, of course, among those which make up the forces that produce war. Base motives are among those which get great cathedrals built and hospitals constructed-contractors' profit-seeking, the vested interests of doctors and clergy. But Europe has not been covered by cathedrals because contractors wanted to make money, or priests wanted jobs.

 

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From the pain come the dream.
From the dream come the vision.
From the vision come the people.
From the people come the power.
From this power come the change.

 

Peter Gabriel

 

Hell is wherever Love is not, and Heaven
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I can't make people change, and I can't change myself. I can't change the political climate, or fix the myriad problems of the world, or make anyone else happy. When I think about these things, I feel impotent and sad. When I don't think about them, I am running away from the truth. Either way I lose.

 

John S. Hall