Compelled Quotes - Page 19

• A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Uplifting, Spiritual, Betrayal

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you no longer are compelled by desire and fear . . . when you have seen the radiance in eternity from all forms of time . . . when you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors . . . and the world will step in and help.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Doors, Desire

  12 Copy quote

• I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Stars, Believe, Ninety Nine

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.290, Library of Alexandria

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human beings are compelled to adopt a belief system; some paradigm to provide meaning, purpose, and understanding to our lives. A quick survey of the world shows that pretty much any idea will do - it need not reflect reality or truth, merely function to fascinate, distract, and compel. We are designed for belief, not for truth.

  Terry Rossio

  Reality, Ideas, Understanding

  14 Copy quote

• Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit.

  Sam Storms

  Grace, Merit, Humans

  12 Copy quote

• It is true I gained muscular vigour, but with it a prodigious appetite, which I was compelled to indulge, and consequently increased in weight, until my kind old friend advised me to forsake the exercise.

  William Banting

  True Friend, Exercise, Old Friends

  William Banting (1864). “Letter on Corpulence: Addressed to the Public”, p.12

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• How can one be compelled to accept slavery? I simply refuse to do the master's bidding. He may torture me, break my bones to atoms and even kill me. He will then have my dead body, not my obedience. Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Struggle, Independence, Bidding

  Mahatma Gandhi (2012). “The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas”, p.300, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.

  Victoria Woodhull

  Women, Feminist, Would Be

  19 Copy quote

• Never break a Muslim's heart by refusing what he offers you, when you know that anything that comes to you through him is in reality from Allah, and he is only His powerless and compelled means.

  Abdullah ibn Alawi al-Haddad

  Wisdom, Islamic, Heart

  28 Copy quote

• A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.

  Johannes Kepler

  Astrology, Belief, Excitement

  7 Copy quote

• There is a difference between motivation and inspiration. Motivation is when you get hold of an idea and don't let go of it until you make it a reality. Inspiration is the reverse-when an idea gets hold of you and you feel compelled to let that impulse or energy carry you along. You get to a point where you realize that you're no longer in charge, that there's a driving force inside you that can't be stopped.

  Wayne Dyer

  Letting Go, Spiritual, Motivation

  4 Copy quote

• To obtain the pure silence necessary for the disciple, the heart and emotions, the brain and its intellectualisms, have to be put aside. Both are but mechanisms, which will perish with the span of man's life. It is the essence beyond, that which is the motive power, and makes man live, that is now compelled to rouse itself and act.

  Mabel Collins

  Heart, Men, Essence

  Mabel Collins (2007). “Light on the Path”, p.42, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Character, Fate, Destiny

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.254, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention - incites a pleasurable compulsion to 'follow' - is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.

  Laura Riding

  Views, Vices, Attention

  "The Promise of Words". London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23, September 07, 1995.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, "the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery'," and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of "the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.

  Ernest Bramah

  Mean, Class, Might

  Ernest Bramah (2016). “THE KAI LUNG FANTASY SERIES: The Wallet of Kai Lung, Kai Lung's Golden Hours & Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat: The Transmutation of Ling, The Story of Yung Chang, The Probation of Sen Heng, The Experiment of the Mandarin Chan Hung, The Confession of Kai Lung, The Vengeance of Tung Fel and more”, p.41, e-artnow

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept.

  E. O. Wilson

  Knowledge, Science, Neurons

  10 Copy quote

• It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Funny, Humorous

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.212, Diversion Books

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• I never volunteer to talk about god or religion, but people feel compelled to talk about it.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  People, Volunteer, Feels

  "Why Revive ‘Cosmos?’ Neil DeGrasse Tyson Says Just About Everything We Know Has Changed". Interview With David Freeman, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 4, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Round and round will Americans be compelled to ride on a mindless, manufactured, racial carousel... for without it, the edifice of an industry built upon grievance and excuse-making is destined to collapse.

  Ilana Mercer

  Excuse, Carousels, Grievance

  "The Ridiculous Racial Merry-Go-Round". www.economicpolicyjournal.com. May 02, 2014.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. ... Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.

  John Carroll

  Mean, Thinking, Goal

  7 Copy quote

• The most superficial fact regarding the 'Discourses,' the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's 'History,' compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.

  Leo Strauss

  Book, Numbers, Two

  "Thoughts on Machiavelli". Book by Leo Strauss, 1958.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.

  Jack Vance

  Erotic, Admiration, Function

  "The Complete Lyonesse" by Jack Vance, Gollancz (p. 449), 2000.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Wise, Wisdom, Men

  18 Copy quote

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that 'if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression', human rights should be protected by the rule of law. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Peace, Men, Law

  "In Quest of Democracy". Essay by Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?

  Herbert Spencer

  Responsibility, Community, Desire

  5 Copy quote