Hopelessness Quotes - page 4
The tragedy of Africa seemingly has no end. Viewing it from afar, the casual Western onlooker can be forgiven if the scenes begin to meld: Ethiopian famine in 1987, Somalian civil war and ensuing famine in 1992, and now Central Africa in 1997. The pictures and footage assume the role of media footnotes: snapshots of hopelessness, disaster, and death that seem as far away as the moon and as unrealistic as some science fiction film. Yet, like the African crises before it, the tragedy of Central Africa is very real and, in a global age, perhaps not as distant as some would like to think. With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.
Michael Johns
They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.
Toni Morrison
Many will know for the first time that they count, that they matter in the scheme of things. An unfamiliar sense of self-esteem will replace their present hopelessness; drugs of all kinds will cease their hold on men. Quietly, men's tears will flow in humble gratitude and longing for the good.
Benjamin Creme
But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.
Franz Kafka
In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.
Richard Wilbur
I sought a different path than that of my parents. I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on. Looking at the once idealistic hippie generation who had long since cut their hair, left the commune, and bought into the system, we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world. In response, we felt love and despair and hopelessness, out of which came the punk rock movement. Seeking to rebel against our parents' pacifism and society's fascist system of oppression and capitalist-driven propaganda, we responded in our own way, different from those before us, creating a new revolution for a new generation. Painfully aware of corruption in the government and inconsistencies in the power dynamics in our homes, we rebelled against our families and society in one loud and fast roar of teen angst. Unwilling to accept the dictates of the system, we did whatever we could to rebel. We wanted freedom and were willing to fight for it.
Noah Levine
Hopelessness means renunciation of all hopes. Aimlessness means renunciation of all aims. Helplessness means renunciation of all help. No master, no disciple, means renunciation of spirituality. And the New Life I have in mind eventually means absolute renunciation. Therefore, if any one asks you what this New Life is, say, 'Absolute and perfect renunciation.' If they ask, 'Renunciation of what?' say, 'Of everything - aims, hopes, help and life itself.
Meher Baba
There are people who would be able to do the same if they'd been given the same privileges as me. I think of how, in our society, so many of us like to consider ourselves the heroes of our own stories. We tell ourselves that we would've been better than our ancestors: We would've fought slavery, fought internment and concentration camps, stopped genocide. Yet these are all things that are happening in the world right now, and I feel a helplessness and hopelessness...
Kacen Callender
A culture that is in the process of being swamped by another often reacts by physically grappling with the outsiders. But it may wage a cultural war as well. Such defensive actions have been given various labels by anthropologists: nativism, revivalism, revitalization, and messianism. All are deliberate efforts to erect a better culture out of the defeat or decay of an older one. ...The reactions of primitive peoples overpowered by Eurasian colonial empires have usually been much more extreme. Their lands appropriated, their social system ripped apart, their customs suppressed, and their holy places profaned-they tried to resist physically but they were inevitably defeated by the superior firepower and technology of the Whites. As hopelessness and apathy settled over these people, the ground was prepared for revivalistic and messianic movements that promised the return of the good old days.
Peter Farb
There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
Toni Morrison