Loss Their Lives Quotes & Sayings

One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always a danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fiber. The — Theodore Roosevelt

So I spoke to my old friend Bruce and told him I was feeling it, his loss of Clarence. We talked for quite a while, and there is no need to go into what two old friends had to say to each other at this point, except to say that two old friends spoke to each other about their music, their muses, their partners in crime, their proof, their friendship, their souls and their lives. Ben Keith was my Clarence Clemons. Clarence Clemons was Bruce's Ben Keith. When he died last year it touched me to the core. I don't want to ever think of any one else playing his parts or occupying his space. No one could. I can't do those songs again unless it's solo. So I told Bruce, "Waylon once looked at me and said, 'There's very few of us left.'" He liked that. I told him when he looked to his right I would be there. That's enough. I'm not talking about that anymore. — Neil Young

Our truth-allergic, experience-addicted populace wants transformation but doesn't want the loss of freedom and control associated with submitting to authority within a committed community. Many "converts" seem to make decisions for Christ but soon lose their enthusiasm because they are offered quick programs for follow-up and small group fellowship rather than a lifelong, embodied experience of community. Many churches do not even have a process for becoming a member. As a result, converts' lives are often not visibly different from those in the culture around them. The older, more communal processes of traditional churches are better at bringing about a more thorough transformation of life. — Timothy Keller

In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that. — Bill McKibben

People jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them from the habit - not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. The drive is that relentless. — Gabor Mate

It is a strange anomaly that men could be careful to insure their houses, their ships, their merchandise, and yet neglect to insure their lives - surely the most important of all to their families, and more subject to loss. — Benjamin Franklin

Crackheads destroy things. First, their lives, obviously. And then their families. But they also destroy houses. They light fires and they have poor judgment; both things are required if you're going to be a crackhead. They make houses burn down. They're not as thorough as meth heads, who have the benefit of their exploding labs, but crackheads have left a respectable number of ruined buildings in their wake. A crackhead did it is a reasonable cause of destruction on any forensic report. A history of crackhead infestation is a legitimate explanation for loss of property. — Mat Johnson

To those of you mourn the loss of a loved one today, my heart goes out to you. We remember that the blessings that we enjoy as Americans came at a dear cost. Our nation owes a debt to its fallen heroes that we cannot ever fully repay. But we can honor their sacrifice, and we must. We must honor it in our own lives by holding their memories close to our hearts, and heeding the example they set. — Barack Obama

If there is excitement in their lives, it is contained in the figures on the profit and loss sheet. What an indictment. — Anita Roddick

Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm. — Kazuo Ishiguro

I've been fascinated with the subject of loss for a long time. In particular, I'm interested in how people, consciously or unconsciously, spend their lives replacing the things they lost when they were children. — Jill Davis

For that entire journey across the rough terrain of Afghanistan, I never stopped praying that everything of the world could be peaceful, that all lives might return to normal. I believe that wish is universal for every woman who is a mother.
For all the horrible happenings that have occurred since I left Afghanistan, I can only think and feel with my mother's heart. For every child lost, a mother's heart harbors the deepest pain. None can see our sons grow to men. None can see our daughters become mothers. No longer can we see the smiles on their faces, or wipe away their tears. My mother's heart feels the pain of every loss, weeping not only for my children, but for the lost children of every mother. — Najwa Bin Laden

Even the most blatant assholes seemed to function in a state of grace when confronted with the brutal loss of a loved one. They moved through the world differently than other people. When they looked at you, you had the feeling that they were really seeing you. Their entire universe was just this one thing, this one event, this one loss. They seemed, for a few weeks, to have things in perspective. Then the inconsequential shit of their lives would start to seep back in. — Chelsea Cain

Without such rejuvenating contact with our inner Self, we become depleted of Spirit and our lives reflect this emptiness. For example, I know individuals - and you may, as well - who seem to have it all (at least on a material level, living prosperous, comfortable lives) but are still deeply unhappy because they're out of touch with their Spirit. Others feel this loss of contact with their Spirit but try to fill the void through drinking, drugging, gambling, having meaningless sex, and more. With — Sonia Choquette

I am at a loss to figure out how to rid my e-mail of those bottom-feeders of the electronic world, the generators of spam ... If I were Emperor of the World, I would lock all the spammers in a room and force them to watch nothing but TV commercials for the rest of their miserable lives, and I would condemn the people who respond to spammers to do nothing but clean the toilets in this room. — Richard Turner

I was sitting in this small coffee shop a couple days ago and I saw this old man sitting at a table across from me. He looked so lonely, so sad. I was too, but it suddenly occurred to me that some people go through their whole lives never being loved or loving as deeply as I love you. There's always going to be the chance that I could lose you in this lifetime. There's nothing any of us can do about the possibility of loss. But in that moment, I decided that I was more interested in focusing on the great privilege I've been given in having you at all. Ch. 32 — Mia Sheridan

Bah, he still saw the same stupidity. The image of the hanged man in the farming community of Yondern flashed through his mind. Now there was a war brewing between the Steelwielders and some foreign religion. More mindless loss over beliefs and mythology. But.. he could not deny the noble features in his companions. Although Perfidian was too blithe and Elaina too didactic, they had risked their life to do what was right. He did owe them his life. He could not deny the nobility he saw in many different people, bits and pieces of nobility that shined through under pressure. The guards who risked their lives to protect the villagers, Markham who flew at the dangerous dwarf, swords flashing; even an Eruthian merchant who stopped in his journey to share tales with complete strangers'. — T.P. Grish

When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life?

Did I learn to be kinder,
To be more patient,
And more generous,
More loving,
More ready to laugh,
And more easy to accept honest tears?
If I accept those legacies of my departed beloveds, I am able to say, Thank You to them for their love and Thank You to God for their lives. — Maya Angelou

The impact of the earthquake on mental health was huge and unimaginably deep in people's lives. Some lost all benchmarks and references because of their great loss, we still have people coming to clinics with mental health problems related to the earthquake. They talk about the earthquake, about being under the rubble. — Reggie Fils-Aime

Young women should begin to build bone mass early in their lives. The more mass there is, the less they will lose in later life. They should enjoy a diet of calcium-rich foods and avoid food and drink that causes bone loss. — Ann Richards

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion, who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge. — Alan Hirsch

Those who have taken a rather more pragmatic and individualist position on not having children tend to talk directly in terms of personal fulfillment. They have made a choice to live their lives in a particular way, associating motherhood with burden and loss - of freedom, energy, money, pleasure, intimacy, and even identity. A child is synonymous with sacrifice and frustrating, even repellent, obligations; it is perhaps a threat to the stability and happiness of one's relationships. They refer to themselves as "child-free" rather than childless because they are free of children and therefore of motherhood. — Elisabeth Badinter

Nevertheless, for the most part the intangible dangers of being observed by unintended audiences are considered secondary to the convenience of instantaneous access to this "virtual campfire" from the comfort of the home. While online social networking sites are often disparaged as poor replacements for human interaction that encourage superficial relationships, my ethnographic analysis reveals how some people, American youth in particular, are incorporating this medium into their everyday practices in more or less meaningful ways. Through elucidating both the dangers and possibilities of this medium, I seek to encourage people to create their own "virtual campfires" as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, their offline lives. Through participation and sharing in meaningful ways- from conversation to creating art- we might begin to see these sites as vehicles for healing the widely-felt loss of community and the pervasive sense of alienation experienced by so many. — Jennifer Anne Ryan

The Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has espoused the right of women to choose abortion through to the end of pregnancy and to commit infanticide on newborns if they so choose. He has defended this position with the utilitarian argument that most women who eliminate an unwanted child will produce a wanted one, and that the loss of happiness of the child who is killed is outweighed by the happiness of the healthy child who follows. 1zAlthough Singer's position is extreme, it reflects the pervasive devaluation of people with Down's syndrome and the assumption that their lives are displeasing to others and themselves. — Andrew Solomon

It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally come into people's lives. This is to say, their inner purpose would emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of the ego would begin to crack open. The emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: being? What do you do with it? — Eckhart Tolle

Those whose lives have been an exercise in the pitting of their wits, or the selling of their talents, time and strength, to those who pay the piper, can even in their old age, even with their wits partially gone, automatically practise defences, and appeal for aid. But not so those who have never asked, who have never bargained. — Norah Hoult

I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her. — Chandler Burr

If you can sustain your interest in what you're doing, you're an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people's professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment - and that's a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place.
What I feel fortunate about is that I'm still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that's the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it. — Milton Glaser

If rulers learn to undervalue the lives of their own subjects by the custom of war, how much more do they undervalue the lives of their enemies! As they learn to hear of the loss of five hundred or a thousand of their own men, with perhaps less feeling than they would hear of the death of a favorite horse or dog, so they learn to hear of the death of thousands after thousands on the side of the enemy with joy and exultation. — Noah Worcester

We can learn so much about the living, according to how they treat their dead. And we can see the true colours of people coming out, when we observe how they act and react, to the circumstances that come about after the death of a loved one. Lastly, we learn about the things most important in our lives, when we experience the loss called death. It is extraordinary how death can give back so much to life and to the living. — C. JoyBell C.

Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Long before we even lose our lives, we lose our souls. Tragic but true. Some carry on - willing to make the sacrifices, putting what is perceived as important before anything else. Some tread into the dark - wasting moments of grace, letting themselves suffer from their own decisions or the other's domination. Some continue to love, give too much, and not leave even a little love for themselves. — Joanne Crisner

People and birds were alike. Things happened that hurt them or made their lives harder. All the time. But losing someone or something important didn't mean the end of everything. It meant you had to find a new way to do things. — Suzanne Goldsmith

The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful some not. Still we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only "I'm sorry for your loss." But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held? — Laura Bush

What would you risk dying for - and for whom - is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss. — Sebastian Junger

Almost every person wonders who their soul mate will be or where they will find them and everyone has or will suffer a love loss or the fear of that loss at different points in their lives. — Matthew Hussey

Possessing a language meant possessing the world expressed in its words. Dispossessing it meant nothing less than the loss of a world and the beginning of bewilderment forever. "Language is the only homeland," said poet Czeslaw Milosz. My parents left the world that created them and now would be beginners for the rest of their lives, mumblers searching for the right word, the proper phrase that approximated what they felt inside. I wonder at the eloquence that must have lived inside them that never found a way out. — Alex Tizon

Most people spend the majority of their lives in fear, focused on themselves, casting everyone around them as bad guys. They almost can't help it, because it happens subconsciously and they don't know any other way to be. When you understand that most human behavior is driven by fear, you will understand why people hurt or offend you. You will understand it isn't about you at all. Their bad behavior is caused by their fear of failure and loss. — Kimberly Giles

Dark thought started to slip into my mind, despite all my efforts to keep them out. What was the use of anything? We were born, we lived a few years, grew old, and then died. What was the point of it all? All those people in the County and the wide world beyond, living their short little lives before going to the grave. What was it all for? My dad was dead. He'd worked hard all his life, but the journey of his life had had only one destination: the grave. That's where we were all heading. into the grave. Into the soil, to be eaten by worms. Poor Billy Bradley had been the Spook's apprentice before me. He'd had his fingers bitten off by a boggat and had died of shock and loss of blood. And where was he now? In a grave. Not even in a churchyard. He was buried outside because the Church considered him no better than a malevolent witch. That would be my fate too. A grave in unhallowed ground. — Joseph Delaney

I think Republicans should fight for the black vote and blacks should fight for a place in the Republican Party, just as they fought for their civil rights in the last century. It's a necessary thing and each may find more in common with the other than they imagine. Blacks will be in a far stronger position if both parties must compete for their votes. And the Republican Party is going to need black votes to compensate for the loss of Hispanic votes resulting from the strongly anti-immigrant views of its base - views that many blacks are in sympathy with. The passing of the generation of black leaders who led the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and the rise of a new generation of black leaders like Barack Obama and others, who have lived their whole lives in a post-civil rights society, may make possible an alliance that was unthinkable just a few years ago. — Bruce Bartlett

I still know this place and its people to the marrow of their bones, to their soft, unguarded core, which had once sustained my own life, yet I am as much of an outsider here as I am on the other side of the world, in my adopted country. The truth is that there is no bridge between the two lives - the past and the present - that would conveniently span the memory of loss and the promise of an onward search. There is only a wound, the inner divide of exile. A daughter of an anatomy professor, I should have known that sliced hearts do not become whole, that split souls do not mend. Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land. — Elena Gorokhova

It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops. — Hannah Harrington

No one seems to have noticed that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything. — Theodore Dalrymple

Most people live their lives as if the end were always years away. They measure their days in love, laughter, accomplishment, and loss. There are moments of sunshine and storm. There are schedules, phone calls, careers, anxieties, joys, exotic trips, favorite foods, romance, shame, and hunger. A person can be defined by clothing, the smell of his breath, the way she combs her hair, the shape of his torso, or even the company she keeps.
All over the world, children love their parents and yearn for love in return. They revel in the touch of parental hands on their faces. And even on the worst of days, each person has dreams about the future-dreams that sometimes come true.
Such is life.
Yet life can end in less time than it takes to draw one breath. — Bill O'Reilly

He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them something - some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Hemming's death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn't care if they really felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn't see them without aching for them. — Hanya Yanagihara

These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry. — Azar Nafisi

I'm convinced that the world, more than ever, needs the music only you can make. And if it takes extra courage to keep playing in spite of your loss, many will applaud the effort. And who knows? Others may be inspired to pick up their broken instruments, their broken lives, and begin again. — Steve Goodier

Studies of people who report high well-being in their fifties and sixties indicate that they have lived lives that involved personal risks. They are not people whose lives have been calm and predictable. A life under tight control sometimes produces quiet desperation. High well-being is a life that has depth and quality. Risks, losses, problems, and tragedy add pain to a life. That pain becomes a teacher. We learn; the pain gives us no choice. — Jennifer James

Why do we as humans always tend to remember the worse things about people? We may know someone for many years, know them as vibrant and healthy, yet when they fall ill and pass away, we can only picture them at their sickest, as though they were born and lived their whole lives wearing a death mask. — K. Martin Beckner

This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love. — Bell Hooks

Most people write off their longing for friends and family as so many losses in their lives, when they should count the fact that their heart is able to long so hard and to love so much as among their greatest blessings. — Etty Hillesum

I've now loved two men in my life, and I've lost them both. Losing them hurts, but their lives taught me so much about living that what they taught me somehow overshadows the loss. — R.K. Ryals

He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals' relatively short lives. The trick - if "trick" was the right word - was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to — John Connolly

Growing up seems easier for men, maybe because their rites of passage are clearer. They perform acts of bravery on the battlefield or show they're men through physical labor or by making money. For women, it's more confusing. We have no rites of passage. Do we become women when a man first makes love to us? If so, why do we refer to it as a loss of virginity? Doesn't the word 'loss' imply that we are better off before? I abhor the idea that we become women only through the physical act of a man. No, I think we become women when we learn what is important in our lives, when we learn to give and to take with a loving heart. — Suzanne Elizabeth Phillips

It would have been unthinkable for anyone on the block not to know the names of the players, their batting averages, and the win-loss record of the pitchers. We knew who they were playing on a given day, where they were playing, who was pitching, and how many games out of first place they might be. We also knew as much information about their personal lives as the baseball cards we flipped and traded provided. Most of our contact with the Dodgers came through the radio and TV play-by-play commentary of Red Barber and Vin Scully, who were as familiar to us as the players. Ebbets — Bernie Sanders

The salient feature of the absurd age I was at
an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich
is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything. — Marcel Proust

We've all changed," he said. "By coming here. By going through the trials that we're all going through, we've all been changed. When we go back, none of us will be the people we were before. The tragedy and the loss and the sense of wonder changes what it means to be human. Do you know what I mean?" Oddly, Anna thought she did. Being a minister meant being in the middle of people's lives. Anna had counseled dating congregation members, presided over their weddings, baptized their babies, and in one heartbreaking case presided over the infant's funeral a year later. Members of the congregation included her in most of the important events of their lives. She was used to it, and mostly enjoyed the deep connection to people it brought. Charting the course of a life was making a map of the ways each event changed the person, leaving someone different on the other side. Passing through the Ring and the tragedies it had brought wouldn't leave any of them the same. — James S.A. Corey

It had been a long fifteen years. So much had changed in both their lives. Both hearts somehow sadly hardened. "Let us just make it through," Claire whispered her desperate plea. It was her only prayer, one she said over and over again. An almost cynical laugh erupted out of her as she turned one last time to say goodbye to her father's tombstone. That was her prayer? That was all she could come up with to say to God? Then so be it. — Laura Aranda

What we should lament is not the loss of houses or of land, but the loss of men's lives. Men come first; the rest is the fruit of their labour. — Thucydides

There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.

But I was telling you about love. About my love...

-- Lyudmila, Ignatenko,
wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko — Svetlana Alexievich

Like everyone else in the world, I've been devastated by the loss and suffering of so many in South Asia ... As a mother, I cannot imagine the pain that they are experiencing. We can all see that it's going to take a long time for those people to rebuild their lives, and they will need our help for years to come. — Celine Dion

As for whom I would like to fight, I always want to fight a guy coming off a win, because the guys coming off a loss are always very tough. They're fighting for their lives. — Diego Sanchez

Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread? — Norman Finkelstein

Fulfillment comes from striving to succeed, to survive by your own wits and strength. Such things make each of us who we are." Using the blanket, he rubbed his hair. "You lose that in captivity, lose yourself, and that loss saps your capacity for joy. I think comfort can be a curse, an addiction that without warning or notice erodes hope. You know what I mean?" He looked at each of them, but no one answered. "Live with it long enough and the prison stops being the walls or the guards. Instead, it's the fear you can't survive on your own, the belief you aren't as capable, or as worthy, as others. I think everyone has the capacity to do great things, to rise above their everyday lives; they just need a little push now and then. — Michael J. Sullivan

The problem is, is the White House and this administration have created a war against police officers in this country, with their allegations and false assertions that there's widespread and pervasive racism in the United States of America that lives in the heart and minds of the men and women in blue. This is a false narrative. It is dangerous. It is reckless. It has resulted in the loss of lives. They are not being held accountable. — Kimberly Guilfoyle

Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream
of becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete
lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs, — Glenn Kurtz

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Was war just a power game for an elite few? Did the loss of human lives really matter to them, or was it just a way to keep score? In reading their own staff-authored speeches over and over again, had they deluded themselves, believing that any action they took was in the cause of freedom and thereby righteous? — Richard Cezar

We've come a long way from the time when the crowning achievement in a woman's life was her youthful marriage. And many would agree that this represents progress for women. But when did the search for someone to marry become self-absorbed and pathetic? This absence of social sympathy for women's ambitions to marry is all the more striking because the social world has cared so deeply about virtually every other aspect of these privileged young women's inner and outer lives. ( ... ) The achievement of a good marriage is the one area of life where the most privileged, accomplished, and high achieving young women in society face a loss of support and sympathy for their ambitions and where the social expectations are for disappointment and failure, not success. — Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful, the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream. — Steve Forbes

Dear young people, choose God for your portion; love his truth, and be not ashamed of it; choose for your company such as serve him in uprightness; and shun as most dangerous the conversation of those whose lives are of an ill savor; for by frequenting such company some hopeful young people have come to great loss, and been drawn from less evils to greater, to their utter ruin. In the bloom of youth no ornament is so lovely as that of virtue, nor any enjoyments equal to those which we partake of in fully resigning ourselves to the Divine will. These enjoyments add sweetness to all other comforts, and give true satisfaction in company and conversation, where people are mutually acquainted with it; and as your minds are thus seasoned with the truth, you will find strength to abide steadfast to the testimony of it, and be prepared for services in the church. — Benjamin Franklin

The most important political effect of this displacement of civil by enterprise association has been the gradual loss of authority and decision-making from the bottom of society, and its transfer to the top. If you supply society with a dynamic purpose, especially one conceived in these linear terms, as moving always forwards towards greater equality, greater justice, greater prosperity or, in the case of the EU, 'ever closer union', you at the same time license the would-be leaders. You give credentials to those who promise to guide society along its allotted path, and you confer on them the authority to conscript, dictate, organize and punish the rest of us, regardless of how we might otherwise wish to lead our lives. In particular, you authorize the invasion of those institutions and associations that form the heart of civil society, in order to impose on them a direction and a goal that may have nothing to do with their intrinsic nature. — Roger Scruton

We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out. — Jackie French