Quotes & Sayings About White Flags

Across the San Joaquin valley, across California, across the entire nation, wherever there are injustices against men and women and children who work in the fields - there you will see our flags - with the black eagle with the white and red background, flying. Our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain. — Cesar Chavez

Every one seems to be scrubbing their white steps. All the houses look like tidy jails, with their outside shutters. Several have crepe on the door-handles, and many have flags flying from roof or balcony. Few men appear, and the women seem to do the business, which, perhaps, accounts for its being so well done. — Louisa May Alcott

There's a part in a woman's soul, God has given it to every woman, and it's the part where you know whether he's telling the truth or not. Women see red flags. — Jessica White

A debilitating absence of government machinery was compounded by White failure in the realm of ideas. Red propaganda effectively stamped the Whites as military adventurists, lackeys of foreign powers, restorationists. The Whites mounted their own propaganda, military parades, and troop reviews blessed by Orthodox priests. Their red, white, and blue flags, the national colors of pre-1917 Russia, often had images of Orthodox saints; others had skulls and crossbones. The Whites copied the Bolshevik practice of the agitation trains. But their slogans - "Let us be one Russian people" - did not persuade. — Stephen Kotkin

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama's star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. - You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase - in blood, in suffering, in death. — Leo Tolstoy

Cynthia didn't mind Confederate flags. She'd like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way. — Laura Lippman

The government ought to intervene in flag design the way they have in cigarette-packet design. Flags kill far more, and make the air around them far filthier. All flags ought to be blank white rectangles, with the name of the country printed in Helvetica in the centre at a strictly regulated size and weight. — Momus

The one who cares the most wins ... That's how I knew I'd end up with everyone else waving the white flags and not me. That's how I knew I'd be the last person standing when it was all over ... I cared the most. — Roseanne Barr

Rather let my left hand take my right hand captive than witness one nation enslave and demolish another. Rather let my heart drag my feet away in chains than witness one ruler flex at the expense of another. Let the flags of nations be white and blank and lifted in the great surrender of humanity.
The Scroll of Anatiya 25:3436 — Zoe Klein

The fields are snowbound no longer;
There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green.
The snow has been caught up into the sky-
So many white clouds-and the blue of the sky is cold.
Now the sun walks in the forest,
He touches the bows and stems with his golden fingers;
They shiver, and wake from slumber.
Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls.
Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears ...
A wind dances over the fields.
Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter,
Yet the little blue lakes tremble
And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver. — Katherine Mansfield

Chamberlain closed his eyes and saw it again. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty. He did not understand it: a mile of men flowing slowly, steadily, inevitably up the long green ground, dying all the while, coming to kill you, and the shell bursts appearing above them like instant white flowers, and the flags all tipping and fluttering, and dimly you could hear the music and the drums, and then you could hear the officers screaming, and yet even above your own fear came the sensation of unspeakable beauty. He shook his head, opened his eyes. Professor's mind. But he thought of Aristotle: pity and terror. So this is tragedy. Yes. He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question. — Michael Shaara

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The six colours, including the white background, represent the colours of all the world's flags ... this is a true international emblem. — Pierre De Coubertin

What white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro reality- the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because he earth turn and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps, the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves all he beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, race, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which us rye inly fact we have. — James Baldwin

There will be no white
flag above my door, I'm in
love and always will be — Dido Armstrong

Load poems like guns -
war's geography calls you
to arms.
The enemy has no signs,
counter-signs,
colors
signals
symbols!
Load poems like guns -
each moment is loaded
with bombs
bullets
blasts
death-sounds -
death and war
don't follow rules
you can make your pages into white flags
a thousand times
but swallow your words, say no more.
Load your poems -
your body -
your thoughts -
like guns.
The schoolhouses of war rise up
within you.
Maybe you are next. — Farzana Marie

The word impossible does not exist for me. I've got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there is not a white one in there. I am going to keep fighting until the day I die - and might keep on fighting afterward ... depends on where I am. — Ted Turner

The Olympic flag [] has a white background, with five interlaced rings in the centre: blue, yellow, black, green and red []. This design is symbolic; it represents the five continents of the world, united by Olympism, while the six colours are those that appear on all the national flags of the world at the present time. — Pierre De Coubertin

Portugal is a high hill with a white watch tower on it flying signal flags. It is apparently inhabited by one man who lives in a long row of yellow houses with red roofs, and populated by sheep who do grand acts of balancing on the side of the hill. — Richard H. Davis

In this city, the victors had delusions of grandeur. It was visual. Across the street from the hotel stood City Hall, sporting an oversized Serb flag that hung from the roof to the ground, a hundred feet tall, fifty feet wide, three horizontal stripes of blue, white and red, so large that only a strong breeze could make it flap. The flag, hanging over a building where, fifty years earlier, Kurt Waldheim worked as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, was meant as a projection of Serb nationalism, as though size were all that mattered, rather than content. I had never thought of flags as weapons, but in Bosnia, as in the rest of Europe, they were becoming the deadliest weapons of all.

p. 80 — Peter Maass

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay. — Anne Rivers Siddons