Crusading Quotes & Sayings

History may be a nightmare - an endless cycle of violence and oppression. Old victims of domination soon became new perpetrators of domination. We have seen this cycle over and over again: American revolutionaries dominating Indigenous peoples and defending slavery, anti-colonial heroes becoming dictators, anti-racists supporting patriarchy and homophobia, liberals crusading for imperial invasion and occupation. Such a nightmare radically calls into question the power of radical love in human history. For King, if we accept such a nightmare, then only self-destruction awaits us. To dream is to hold death at arm's length. To love is to really be alive in history. Without radical love, nihilism triumphs - "power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."1 — Martin Luther King Jr.

All black people who are even minimally conscious, black people who have ever experienced Europe's technological power crusading in the vanguard of a civilizing mission, have profound feelings of inferiority and bitterly regret the fact that the Industrial Revolution did not agreeably commence in Dahomey or Dakar. Nothing is achieved by concealing this fact. — Lewis Nkosi

God. Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love. — Philip Yancey

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene. — Jacques Derrida

You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. — Roger Kimball

Each of our 900 shows so far was different - maybe that's what makes the fans come back to our gigs time and again. And that they're always part of the show. Phish concerts are a communal experience. — Page McConnell

Traffic counting was very boring and cold to sit out on the streets of New Haven in five pairs of pants - well, that's an exaggeration; it was three pairs of pants - in November for hours and hours clicking buttons counting which cars go left, right, and forward. — John Hodgman

I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. — Unknown Author 47

If the six-nation forums dealing with Iran and North Korea suffer comparable failures, the consequence will be a world of unchecked proliferation, not controlled by either governing principles or functioning institutions. A modern, strong, peaceful Iran could become a pillar of stability and progress in the region. This cannot happen unless Iran's leaders decide whether they are representing a cause or a nation - whether their basic motivation is crusading or international cooperation. The goal of the diplomacy of the Six should be to oblige Iran to confront this choice. — Henry A. Kissinger

For heaven's sake, Darling, keep your crusading instinct [for social justice] under control ... It's uncomfortable to live with especially for those of us who haven't got one. — P.D. James

Each technology has its own merits, and therefore it may be more useful to leave aside this crusading view of the electronic word vanquishing the printed one and explore instead each technology according to its particular merits. Perhaps — Alberto Manguel

The Peace Corps is guilty of enthusiasm and a crusading spirit. But we're not apologetic about it. — Sargent Shriver

The real thing creates its own poetry. — Anzia Yezierska

It was against this backdrop that the great fortunes were made, fortunes which allowed the first families to dominate the society of that era. Theodore Parker, a crusading minister in the 1840s, wrote of the Lowells and these other great families: "This class is the controlling one in politics. It mainly enacts the laws of this state and the nation; makes them serve its turn ... It can manufacture governors, senators, judges to suit its purposes as easily as it can manufacture cotton cloth. This class owns the machinery of society ... ships, factories, shops, water privileges." They were also families which had a fine sense of protecting their own position, and they were notorious for giving large grants to Harvard College, which was their college, and just as notorious for doing very little for public education. — David Halberstam

I'm living my future as long as you're living in the present and realize how beautiful life is. — Dhani Jones

What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were "political" and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The kind of event on a conveyor belt that causes a fire occurs in a variety of industrial environments, not uniquely in coal environments. — Richard Price

This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'm glad to see that the crusading spirit of your forebears hasn't been entirely obliterated by rock and roll. — Ken Follett

Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to successful life. — Theodore Roosevelt

He saw with sudden awful clarity that if he turned tail now and if, by some appalling miracle, she should survive, he'd never hear the end of it. She'd latch onto his flawed character and hold it up for relentless ridicule till the end of time, or thereabouts. — Helen Hodgman

I put my fingers under Emily's chin, tilting her head up. "I love you."
Emily's dark eyes widen and if this moment wasn't so dire, I'd laugh at her expression. swipe a finger across her smooth cheek. "I've never said that to anyone and I don't plan on it being the last time, either. I love you, Emily, and I'm telling you we'll work ths out. — Katie McGarry

Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying. — Nora Ephron

It is unlikely that Percy would have written my mother after her return from Europe, and, had she written, the letter would have been destroyed, since that family had a crusading detestation of souvenirs. Letters, photographs, diplomas - anything that authenticated the past was always thrown into the fire. — John Cheever

The purpose of U.S. foreign policy is protecting the security of Americans, not crusading for goodness abroad. — Don Feder

That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies. — Jeffrey Rosen

Commitment cannot be taught;
it can only be caught.
I refer to the crusading spirit.
Without the crusading spirit,
you may have the starting power
but not the staying power. — Y. C. James Yen

I should be campaigning for his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn't quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Subtle. I — Jon Ronson

I've always enjoyed real work more than schoolwork. My mother will attest to that - she was always concerned about me academically. — David Ulevitch

All has changed, thanks to Joe Eszterhas' life-threatening battle with throat cancer. He announced in "The New York Times" that he and Hollywood had blood on their hands and now Eszterhas is crusading to stop Hollywood's glamorization of smoking. — Joe Eszterhas