Rivers Of Blood Quotes & Sayings

I was born upon thy bank, river, My blood flows in thy stream, And thou meanderest forever, At the bottom of my dream. — Henry David Thoreau

If history teaches us any lessons at all, it teaches us that force applied to religion creates not a purity of faith but a river of blood. — Edwin Gaustad

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years. — Winston Churchill

Or consider the mainstream religions. We are enjoined in Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to commit murder; in Leviticus we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves; and in the Gospels we are urged to love our enemies. Yet think of the rivers of blood spilled by fervent followers of the books in which these well-meaning exhortations are embedded. In — Carl Sagan

Darwin's Ark
The fact is, I know those ancestors
floating through my sleep:
an animal that breathed water,
had a great swimming tail,
an imperfect skull, undoubtedly
hermaphrodite ... I slide
through all the oceans with these kin,
salt water pulsing in my veins,
and aeons follow me into the trees:
a hairy, tailed quadruped,
arboreal in its habits, scales
slipping off my flanks ...
I have sailed the ancients seas to come
to the bones of Megatherium ...
The thing I want to father most
is the rarest, most difficult thing of all.
Though knee-deep in these rivers of innocent blood,
I want to be - a decent animal. — Philip Appleman

A first attempt to recover the right of self government may fail, so may a second, a third, etc. But as a younger and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment becomes more and more intuitive, and a fourth, a fifth, or some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed ... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood and years of desolation. For what inheritance so valuable can man leave to his posterity? — Thomas Jefferson

Well, Vin says that there's something behind all this, right? Some evil force of doom or whatever? Well, if I were said force of doom, then I certainly wouldn't have used my powers to turn the land black. It just lacks flair. Red. Now, that would be an interesting color. Think of the possibilities
if the ash were red, the rivers would run like blood. Black is so monotonous that you can forget about it, but red
you'd always be thinking, 'Why, look at that. That hill is red. That evil force of doom trying to destroy me certainly has style. — Brandon Sanderson

I want to tell Carter and Begin that when the Arabs set off their volcano there will be only Arabs in this part of the world ... Our people will continue to fuel the torch of the revolution with rivers of blood until the whole of the occupied homeland is liberated, the whole of the homeland is liberated, not just a part of it. — Yasser Arafat

The property is cursed. Death dwells here. These rivers run with the blood of those who came before you. Life may not trespass, and when it tries, it will surely be snuffed out. — Denise Daisy

Bodies like this give sexual desire its meaning! It's for this that penises rise like drawbridges and vaginas become engorged with blood! It's for this that people throw snot-nosed kids into ravines, cross raging rivers, or ice-pick up the wrong side of frozen waterfalls! It's for this that politicians undo their flies in election season, porn magazines with their pages stuck together are found stacked in church basements, people chop off body parts and mail them to ex-lovers, risk hair on palms, stolen wallets, planes flying into buildings, and lice that hop like chess figurines on a board whose players are ever changing. — Barry Webster

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness ... — Anne Rivers Siddons

Vasectomy
After the steaming bodies swept
through the hungry streets of swollen cities;
after the vast pink spawning of family
poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies;
after the gamble of latex and
diaphragms and pills;
I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades
ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge
of Increase and Multiply, made
affirmation: Yes, deliver us from
complicity.
And after the precision of scalpels,
I woke to a landscape of sunshine where
the catbird mates for life and
maps trace out no alibis - stepped
into a morning of naked truth,
where acts mean what they really are:
the purity of loving
for the sake of love. — Philip Appleman

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark. — Pablo Neruda

How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity's song
all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.
We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God. — Nicholas Wolterstorff

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. — Carl Sagan

The rivers of America will run with blood filled to their banks before we will submit to them taking the Bible out of our schools. — Billy Sunday

The energy that moves life is the force of the Feminine. She is unstoppable. She is the source of all life, the mover of blood, the breather of breath, the flow of the river's water. The Feminine is life. We can feel Her moving and living in any moment we are open to Her, or as Her. — David Deida

I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it's painful gall-stones, it's gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul ... — Henry Miller

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers. — Langston Hughes

The fanged shadows boiled out behind them, howling for blood, their voices creaking with the sound of snapping bones. The fallen of Hethor's own party seemed to be swept up in the pursuit, dead correct people on their trail, keening, crying, blaming. Rivers of red flowed rapidly across the stone dock in the twilight, slippery sticky blood overtaking their flight to make them trip and slide headfirst into stone bollards or pitch screaming into the sea. — Jay Lake

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot' — Carl Sagan

Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers. — Holly Lisle

Michael took a cloth and dried her hair. When he finished, he pulled her close and cradled her in his arms. "Flesh of my flesh," he whispered against her hair. "Blood of my blood. — Francine Rivers

The bathroom door swings open. Emma sees the blood painting my skin and the red rivers carved on my body. Emma sees the wet knife, silver and bone. The screams of my little sister shatter mirrors. — Laurie Halse Anderson

ShadowClan will soar above you all!" "Leopard and Tiger will feast on your bones!" "Rivers of blood, washing away everything the Clans have known . . . — Erin Hunter

The river Guadalquivir
Flows between oranges and olives
The two rivers of Granada
Descend from the snow to the wheat

Oh my love!
Who went and never returned

The river Guadalquivir
Has beards of maroon
The two rivers of Granada
One a cry the other blood

Oh my love!
Who vanished into thin air — Federico Garcia Lorca

I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest. — Anne Rivers Siddons

The Zionists accepted the partition plan. The AHC and the Arab states rejected any proposal to share the land and vowed to drown the fledging Jewish state in rivers of blood. — Sol Stern

If we are going to create a financial system that works for all Americans, we have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees.
In my view, it is unacceptable that Americans are paying a $4 or $5 fee each time they go to the ATM.
It is unacceptable that millions of Americans are paying credit card interest rates of 20 or 30 percent.
The Bible has a term for this practice. It's called usury. And in The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates.
Today, we don't need the hellfire and the pitch forks, we don't need the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law. — Bernie Sanders

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky - her grand old woods - her fertile fields - her beautiful rivers - her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, - when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing. — Frederick Douglass

This time I saw. In a blue heaven was coiled an infinite snake of gold and green, with four eyes of fire, black fire and red, that darted rays in every direction; held within its coils was a great multitude of laughing children. And even as I looked, all this was blotted out. Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of blood purulent with nameless forms - mangy dogs with their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half elephant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly bloodshot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. — Aleister Crowley

The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. — Mary Brave Bird

In the next hour, as he lay dying, he thought only of that moment of serenity, kneeling next to the church where he had been a boy before he grew into a man and realized the clarity of strength, his knees damp in the wet ground and in his palm the blue and red and purple glass.

As he lay dying, his flesh ripped like fabric, his blood flowing freely like the rain that came so often, he thought only of those beautiful shards of glass and the weight that they carried, and he found it difficult to comprehend that while he held those small holy things, how something so big and so powerful and so violent could have been so silent as it crept up behind him. — Michael Farris Smith

Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses ... — Edward Abbey

This is the equivalent of an "internal shower". As the spring freshness born of the heavy rains and vast masses of melting snows on mountains in the hinterlands cause rivers to swell and rush turbulently onward to the sea, so too will your blood flow with renewed vigor as the direct result of your faithfully performing the Contrology exercises. — Joseph Pilates

LOOK AROUND. GAME DEAD, RIVERS BLACK, LAND CHOKED WITH WEED. SKIES BLEEDING, RED AS BLOOD. FOR WHAT?
YOUR KIND ARE BLIND. YOU SEE ONLY THE NOW. NEVER THE WILL BE.
BUT SOON YOU WILL. WHEN ALL IS GONE, WHEN THERE ARE SO MANY MONKEY-CHILDREN THAT YOU MURDER FOR A SCRAP OF LAND, A DROP OF CLEAN WATER, THEN YOU WILL SEE. — Jay Kristoff

All things are connected, like the blood that runs in your family "The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father." 1854 The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. You must give to the rivers the kindness you would give to any brother. — Chief Seattle

When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into rivers of the blood of cannon-blasted bodies. — Comte De Lautreamont

I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade ... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet ... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it. — Marquis De Sade

Crossing over mountains, rivers, arid oceans, setting at naught, as it were, the obstacles of the distance of space and time, the blood of Indian thought has flowed, and is still flowing into the veins of other nations of the globe, whether in a distinct or in some subtle unknown way. Perhaps to us belongs the major portion of the universal ancient inheritance. — Swami Vivekananda

Lead looked to his hand and saw sparkling chunks of glass in the cracks of the road. He saw ants running around the cracks, infinitely small. His blood ran into the cracks, creating rivers for the industrious ants to perplex over. Lead smiled at the creatures, for he understood that there is no difference between them and us in their wanderings and labor. — Nathan Yocum

To me, a forest is just a bunch of trees, but lakes and rivers are alive. Water is to the land what blood is to the land. — Sam Torode

The fighting was fierce and lasted for the greater part of a day; blood ran in rivers. — Matthew Of Edessa

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.
Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life
Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines.
Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored,
The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree
Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning.
See your rivers stirring with musk alligators
And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens.
Just open your eyes to the April rainbow
And your eyes, especially your ears, to God
Who in one burst of saxophone laughter
Created heaven and earth in six days,
And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

It was another of the Great Bastards: Ser Aegor Rivers, called Bittersteel. Perhaps it was his Bracken blood that made Aegor so choleric and so quick to take offense. Perhaps it was the ignominious fall of the — George R R Martin

At the skin, my blood calls out to
your heart, my whole sky craves
an island of tenderness.
My rivers tilt towards you. — Marina Tsvetaeva

All night I streched my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone 'Please keep him safe.
Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces.' Makes a cathedral, him pressing against
me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe
his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars. — Richard Siken

This dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood ... — Vladimir Bukovsky

Letting go is a scary enterprise for those of us who believe that the world revolves only because it has a handle on the top of it which we personally turn, and that if we were to drop this handle for even a moment, well - that would be the end of the universe. But try dropping it, Groceries. This is the message I'm getting. Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in midflight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. Life continues to go. — Elizabeth Gilbert

To fly! to live as airmen live! Like them to ride the skyways from horizon to horizon, across rivers and forests! To free oneself from the petty disputes of everyday life, to be active, to feel the blood renewed in one's vein - ah! that is life ... Life in finer and simpler. My will is freer. I appreciate everything more, sunlight and shade, work and my friends. The sky is vast. I breathe deep gulps of the fine clear air of the heights. I feel myself to have achieved a higher state of physical strength and a clearer brain. I am living in the third dimension! — Henri Mignet

Why do many believers insist on repeatedly pointing to the crimes of 20th century dictators who led officially atheistic societies as some sort of evidence of their god's existence? It makes no sense.
If the rivers of blood on Stalin's hands and Mao's hands, for example, are supposed to prove there is a god, then what do the oceans of blood on the hands of several thousand years' worth of religious kings, queens, presidents, popes, priests, generals, Crusadersm jihadists and tribal chiefs prove? It's not, of course, but if bodycount is somehow the measure of a god's likelihood of existence, then believers lose.
It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon. — Guy P. Harrison