F Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with F. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“For centuries poets, some poets, have tried to give a voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels-at the very least with the tongues of angels-they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.”
Source: Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals
“For centuries scientists too accepted these humanist guidelines. When physicists wondered whether to get married or not, they too watched sunsets and tried to get in touch with themselves. When chemists contemplated whether to accept a problematic job offer, they too wrote diaries and had heart-to-heart talks with a good friend. When biologists debated whether to wage war or sign a peace treaty, they too voted in democratic elections. When brain scientists wrote books about their startling discoveries, they often put an inspiring Goethe quote on the first page. This was the basis for the modern alliance between science and humanism, which kept the delicate balance between the modern yang and the modern yin – between reason and emotion, between the laboratory and the museum, between the production line and the supermarket.”
Source: Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
“For centuries the Bible's emphasis on compassion and love for our neighbor has inspired institutional and governmental expressions of benevolent outreach such as private charity, the establishment of schools and hospitals, and the abolition of slavery.”
“For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of greatness. We call them saints when what we really often mean to say is 'icon,' 'star,' 'hero,' ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness that they give us a glimpse of the face of God in the center of the human. They give us a taste of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves.”
“For centuries the church has stood by while science picked away at religion bit by bit. Debunking miracles. Training the mind to overcome the heart. Condemning religion as the opiate of the masses. They denounce God as a hallucination - a delusional crutch for those too weak to accept that life is meaningless. I could not stand by while science presumed to harness the power of God himself! Proof, you say? Yes, proof of science's ignorance! What is wrong with the admission that something exists beyond our understanding? The day science substantiates God in a lab is the day people stop needing faith!”
Source: Angels & Demons
“For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.”
Source: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays
“For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.”
Source: Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History
“For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.”
“For centuries the word 'nature' has been used to bolster prejudices or to express, not reality, but a state of affairs that the user would wish to see.”
“For centuries those people were hunters, and now hunting has been taken away from them, without anything taking its place. When you separate people from their past without giving them anything in its place, they live with their eyes on that past . . . They're not the ones to blame.”
Source: The Roots of Heaven
“For centuries we have been living in the society where not laws but people ruled, where there was no legal state.”
“For centuries we have been ripped apart by the hands of others as well as ourselves. Our personalities have been conditioned to become disconnected from our most Earthly ancestral knowledge. The days of disconnectedness are over. We must begin anew.”
“For centuries we have searched for the right term for this "call". The Romans named it your 'genius'; the Greeks, your 'daimon'; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo's intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an imaginal body, the 'ochema', that carried you like a vehicle. It was your personal bearer or support. For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the 'ka', or the 'ba' with whom you could converse. Among the people we refer to as Eskimos and others who follow shamanistic practices, it is your spirit, your free-soul, your animal-soul, your breath-soul.”
Source: The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“For centuries women have been saying many of the things we are saying today and which we have often thought of as new.”
“For centuries, women have struggled against tremendous odds to have their contracts taken seriously. At great personal expense, they stood up and demanded the right to own land, to control their own wages, to retain custody of their children-in other words, to become legally responsible for themselves and for their property. A woman's consent must never again become legally irrelevant.”
Source: XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography
“For centuries you have been taught that love-sponsored action arises out of the choice to be, do, and have whatever produces the highest good for another. Yet I tell you this: the highest choice is that which produces the highest good for you.”
Source: The Complete Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue
“For centuries, America has led the world on a long march toward freedom and democracy. Let's reclaim our clean energy leadership and lead the world toward clean energy independence.”
“For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.”
Source: Name of the Rose
“For centuries, Cubas greatest resource has been its people.”
“For centuries, dreams have been used to communicate instruction and direction to people of purpose - great men and women. God used dreams to prepare Joseph for his future as a leader of nations. He gave battle plans to Gideon in a dream. Joan of Arc, Jacob, George Washington, Marie Curie, and the apostle Paul were all guided by their dreams.”
Source: Traveler's Gift; Mastering the Seven Decisions
“For centuries, epilepsy was the exact expectation of someone being possessed by the Devil. There was no better explanation, and it allows you to admit the existence of the Devil. If there's a Devil, that mean's there's a God.”
“For centuries, Europeans dominated the African continent. The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white; his mission, he claimed, was to "civilize" Africa. Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering on the African people.”
“For centuries, everything was taught through music. History was taught through music; language and mathematics were taught through music.”
“For centuries, faith has helped us overcome problems and helped us work to achieve a more perfect union. It has inspired the many leaders who played a key role in abolishing slavery, protecting civil rights and, hopefully one day, becoming a nation where all life from conception to natural death is protected.”
“For centuries, humans have said to horses, 'You do what I tell you or I'll hurt you.' Humans still say that to each other -- still threaten, force and intimidate. I'm convinced that my discoveries with horses have value in the workplace, in the educational and penal systems, and in the raising of children. At heart, I'm saying that no one else has the right to say 'you must' to an animal -- or to another human.”
“For centuries, Jews have been unjustly treated and despised. It is time they were treated with justice and humanity. God wills it and the Church wills it. St. Paul tells us that the Jews are our brothers. They should also be welcomed as friends.”
“For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.”
“For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth. Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise.”
“For centuries, New York has served as the gateway for millions of people from all over the world in search of the American dream. It only makes sense that it would now serve as a gateway for the world's greatest athletes.”
“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.”
Source: For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)
“For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.”
“For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.”
Source: For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)
“For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.”
“For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.”
Source: We Should All Be Feminists
“For centuries, the world has heard the oppressed, the downtrodden and the vulnerable cry out for their freedoms, for their rights and for a chance to emerge from the shadows of the tyranny and bloodshed that they had lived with.”
“For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is - it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself.”
“For centuries, we were taught that anger is bad. Our parents, teachers, priests, everyone taught us how to control and suppress our anger. But I ask: why can't we convert our anger for the larger good of society?”
“For CEOs today, it's all about acheieving growth and efficiency through innovation. It's not about product innovation so much anymore as about innovating business models. process, culture and management.”
“For certain he hath seen all perfectness
For certain he hath seen all perfectness.
Who among other ladies hath seen mine:
They that go with her humbly should combine
To thank their God for such peculiar grace.
So perfect is the beauty of her face
That it begets in no wise any sign
Of envy, but draws round her a clear line
Of love, and blessed faith, and gentleness.
Merely the sight of her inakes all things bow:
Not she herself alone is holier
Than all: but hers, through her, are raised above.
From all her acts such lovely graces flow
That truly one may never think of her
Without a passion of exceeding love.”
“For certain I get what I focus on. So I make certain to focus on the good I desire.”
Source: Brilliant Words to Grow By: A Devotional Celebrating the Duality of Life
“For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.”
“For certain the future is not a stand still point waiting your arrival, the future is the result of every action you take right now.”
“For certain you can be helped, should you accept it. But as far as being made...no one can do that. This occurred on the day you were born. An earth day is not a birth day. Own what you create as well as what you break.”
Source: From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence
“For certainly there cannot be a higher pleasure than to think that we love and are beloved by the most amiable and best Being.”
“For change to happen in any community, the initiative must come from the individual.”
“For change to occur in us, we must be willing to enter the wilderness of the unknown and to wander in unfamiliar territory, directionless and often in the darkness....We do not need to keep every little thing under control. In fact, we find ourselves only by allowing some falling apart to happen.”
Source: Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse
“For, change was and is the only constant in life.”
Source: Yours Legally
“For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent.”
Source: Awaken The Giant Within
“For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent. Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards... If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve... Whatever happens, take responsibility... The only thing that's keeping you from getting what you want is the story you keep telling yourself.”
“For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .”
Source: Middlemarch