Al Lerner Quotes

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

It is not science that has destroyed the world, despite all the gloomy forebodings of the earlier prophets. It is man who has destroyed man.

Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

The Russians train; they do not dare educate.

A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman.

It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.

Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.

God is what man finds that is divine in himself. It is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.

Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.

The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.

It is almost as easy to be enervated by triumph as by defeat.

Songs are snapshots of things - it's likened to looking at pictures.

I don't really consider myself a "singer." I am getting more comfortable singing every day, which is great.

I never really got into any records purely thinking of them as a breakup record. I mean, honestly, for me, listening to a breakup record whilst dealing with one seems counterproductive!

Songs are snapshots of things - it's likened to looking at pictures. It will never feel like it felt in real life. When you look at it, it always feels different. It's sort of the same with songs.

Because religious institutions are not afraid to talk about love as a goal, they are likely to be more effective at providing community services.

I have come to know well that fates are fickle in the business of English football. And I feel that I have pushed mine well past the limit.

I want a life of good sport, good people and the competition that goes with it.

AT&T to wed T-Mobile. Following the ceremony there will be no reception.

The venture community is largely male.

[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

There is adventure in finding compelling stories and exploring complex issues in challenging environments, but there is also a responsibility to tell those stories accurately and objectively.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn't know the difference.

She was the kind of art that was so valuable it wasn't even for sale, and she smiled when she saw Ash. His pulse jumped.

Since the world is ending, ” Peter quoted from behind us, “why not let the children touch the paintings?

Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.

I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening.

Loneliness Ends With Love

There’s a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don’t need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way.

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.

Every man has two counties--his own and America.

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

Poetry": What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.

Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.

My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.

I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.

Maybe she's a spaghetti girl.....straight until wet.

Oozing charm from every pore He oiled his way around the floor.

Youth I Stay close to the young and a little rubs off.

God is what man finds that is divine in himself. God is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.