#defiance

While he spoke, my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Think of his misery; think of his danger — look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair — soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?" Still indomitable was the reply — "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad — as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth — so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am quite insane — quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot." I did. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#empowerment #independence #individuality #integrity #self-assurance

We know that if gold, if fraud, if force can defeat us, they will all be used. And we have resolved that they shall not defeat us. We shall arm. We shall meet fraud and falsehood with defiance, and force with force, if need be. ↗

— Denis Kearney

#defeat #defiance #falsehood #force #fraud

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#artist #blow #defiance #every #exists

Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times. ↗

— Franz Marc

#art #artists #because #been #connected

It has been, after all, 11 years, more than a decade now, of defiance of U.N. resolutions by Saddam Hussein. Every obligation that he signed onto after the Gulf War, so that he would not be a threat to peace and security, he has ignored and flaunted. ↗

— Condoleezza Rice

#been #decade #defiance #every #gulf

Well, there's been plenty of ultimatums, and one thing that we better be very clear is that we can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community that we've had. ↗

— Condoleezza Rice

#better #clear #community #continue #defiance

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#change #defiance #history #opposition #self-assurance

What is it like to be so free - so trapped, but so free? What kind of bird sings only when caught? What kind of slave outshines and rises above her master? ↗

— Courtney M. Privett

#freedom #slavery #freedom

The human creature, humiliated and offended in ways that are inconceivable to the mind and heart, defies the blind and deaf divinity. ↗

— Françoise Mauriac

#divinity #god #human-nature #pain #nature

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. ↗

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

#defiance #despair #done #god #greatest