Birth Quotes - Page 33

• Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's agethat familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth oridentity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment, but pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self.

  Gloria Steinem

  Art, Lying, Thinking

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• It is conceivable at least that a late generation, such as we presumably are, has particular need of the sketch, in order not to be strangled to death by inherited conceptions which preclude new births.... The sketch has direction, but no ending; the sketch as reflection of a view of life that is no longer conclusive, or is not yet conclusive.

  Max Frisch

  Reflection, Views, Order

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• I was born in a Negro town.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Race, Towns, Born

  Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.28, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• What we call birth
  Is but a beginning to be something else
  Than what we were before; and when we cease
  To be that something, then we call it death.

  Ovid

  Death, Cease

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• Face troubles from their birth, for 'tis too late to cure
  When long delay has given the evil strength.
  Haste then; postpone not to the coming hour: tomorrow
  He'll be less ready who's not ready now.

  Ovid

  Long, Evil, Haste

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• A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?

  Mason Cooley

  Wall, Thoughtful, Boys

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• Birth dates and bathroom scales tell more truth than I want to know.

  Mason Cooley

  Truth, Want, Bathroom

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• The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

  Albert Camus

  Artist, Revolution, Poet

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• Not to be born surpasses all reckoning. The next best thing by far, when one has been born is to go back as swiftly as possible whence one came.

  Sophocles

  Next, Reckoning, Born

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• But oh! each visitation
  Suspends what nature gave me any my birth,
  My shaping spirit of Imagination.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Imagination, Spirit, Visitation

  'Dejection: an Ode' (1802) st. 6.

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• A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Men, Ideas, Opposites

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1913*). “Golden Hours with Samuel Taylor Coleridge”

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• Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself.

  Blaise Pascal

  Running, Ignorance, Knowledge

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• All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theater. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love.

  Blaise Pascal

  Love, Christian, Passion

  Blaise Pascal (1959). “Pascal's Pensées: Selections”, p.18, Prabhat Prakashan

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• Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place i1legally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization.

  Bernard Nathanson

  Mean, Media, Numbers

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• If we are the younger, we may envy the older. If we are the older, we may feel that the younger is always being indulged. In otherwords, no matter what position we hold in family order of birth, we can prove beyond a doubt that we're being gypped.

  Judith Viorst

  Order, Envy, Doubt

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• Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  Country, Teacher, Money

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• I do not think any reasonable person can doubt that in India, China and Japan, if the knowledge of birth control existed, the birthrate would fall very rapidly

  Bertrand Russell

  Fall, Thinking, Japan

  Bertrand Russell (1992). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959”, p.706, Psychology Press

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• The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against nature.

  Bertrand Russell

  Birth Control, Objections

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.64, Routledge

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• Big heart,
  wide as a watermelon,
  but wise as birth,
  there is so much abundance
  in the people I have.

  Anne Sexton

  Wise, Heart, People

  Anne Sexton (1975). “The Awful Rowing Toward God”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

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• ... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.

  Rebecca West

  Sight, Ties, Understanding

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.149, Open Road Media

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• The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.

  James Whistler

  Mother, Simple, Explanation

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• Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?

  Karl Kraus

  Truth, Errors, Given

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.

  Stendhal

  Pride, Men, Flattery

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• It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I've explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.

  Anna Quindlen

  Sex, Believe, Heart

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.219, Ballantine Books

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• The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.

  Anna Quindlen

  Home, Simple, Government

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