Clergy

"Of all human ills, greatest is fortune's wayward tyranny."

"ἀλλ᾽ ἢ καλῶς ζῆν ἢ καλῶς τεθνηκέναι τὸν εὐγενῆ χρή"

"Γύναι, γυναιξὶ κόσμον ἡ σιγὴ φέρει."

"στέργειν δέ τάκπεσόντα καί θέσθαι πρέπει σοφόν κυβευτήν, ’αλλά μη στένειν τύχην."

"Thoughts are mightier than strength of hand."

"No oath can be too binding for a lover."

"Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted."

"The dice of Zeus fall ever luckily."

"The truth is always the strongest argument."

"Children are the anchors of a mother's life."

"If I am Sophocles, I am not mad; and if I am mad, I am not Sophocles."

"If ills you do, ills also you must bear."

"πῶς," ἔφη, "ὦ Σοφόκλεις, ἔχεις πρὸς τἀφροδίσια; ἔτι οἷός τε εἶ γυναικὶ συγγίγνεσθαι"; καὶ ὅς, "εὐφήμει," ἔφη, "ὦ ἄνθρωπε: ἁσμενέστατα μέντοι αὐτὸ ἀπέφυγον, ὥσπερ λυττῶντά τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην ἀποδράς."

"Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act."

"If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief."

"War loves to seek its victims in the young."

"It is better not to live at all than to live disgraced."

"Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all."

"Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; But when the truth entails tremendous ruin, To speak dishonorably is pardonable."

"A short saying often contains much wisdom."

"No man loves life like him that's growing old."

"A lie never lives to be old."

"Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot."

"When ice appears out of doors, and boys seize it up while it is solid, at first they experience new pleasures. But in the end their pride will not agree to let it go, but their acquisition is not good for them if it stays in their hands. In the same way an identical desire drives lovers to act and not to act."

"The Philoctetes is a most noble play; conspicuous even among the works of Sophocles for the grace and majesty of effect produced by the most simple means. There is more character in it than in any play in the Greek language; two or three of Euripides's best excepted."

"I have been less pleased with this perusal of the Œdipus Tyrannus than I was when I read it in January; perhaps because I then read it all at one sitting. The construction seems to me less perfect than I formerly thought it. But nothing can exceed the skill with which the discovery is managed. The agony of Œdipus is so unutterably grand; and the tender sorrow, in which his mind at last reposes after his daughters have been brought to him, is as moving as anything in the Greek Drama."

"The first part of the Ajax is prodigiously fine. I do not know that the agonies of wounded honour have ever been so sublimely represented... But the interest of the piece dies with Ajax. In the debates which follow, Sophocles does not succeed as well as Euripides would have done. The odes, too, are not very good."

"... Sophocles, the poet loved and feared, Whose mighty voice once called out of her lair The Dorian muse severe, with braided hair, Who loved the thyrsus and wild dances weird."

"Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand. Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea."

"Be his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul From first youth tested up to extreme old age Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole; The mellow glory of the Attic stage, Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child."

"ὁ δ’εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδ’, εὔκολος δ’ἐκεῖ"

"One word Frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love."

"ἐν ᾧ τλάμων ὅδ᾽, οὐκ ἐγὼ μόνος, πάντοθεν βόρειος ὥς τις ἀκτὰ κυματοπλὴξ χειμερία κλονεῖται, ὣς καὶ τόνδε κατ᾽ ἄκρας δειναὶ κυματοαγεῖς ἆται κλονέουσιν ἀεὶ ξυνοῦσαι."

"μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νι- κᾷ λόγον."

"In a just cause the weak o'ercome the strong."

"The speech from the throne speaks about maintaining peace - peace today, when Canadian nickel is being indirectly shipped to Ethiopia. Peace today, when Italian aeroplanes are being flown with British oil! Peace! Mr. Speaker, if this be peace it must be like the peace of the Lord - it passeth all understanding."

"It's the story of a place called Mouseland. Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do. They even had a Parliament. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats. Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for last 90 years and maybe you'll see that they weren't any stupider than we are. Now I'm not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws--that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren't very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouseholes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds--so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much physical effort. All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats. Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that Mouseland needs is more vision." They said:"The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouseholes we got. If you put us in we'll establish square mouseholes." And they did. And the square mouseholes were twice as big as the round mouseholes, and now the cat could get both his paws in. And life was tougher than ever. And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black cats and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat. You see, my friends, the trouble wasn't with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice. Presently there came along one little mouse who had an idea. My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea. And he said to the other mice, "Look fellows, why do we keep on electing a government made up of cats? Why don't we elect a government made up of mice?" "Oh," they said, "he's a Bolshevik. Lock him up!" So they put him in jail. But I want to remind you: that you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can't lock up an idea!"

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

"I went around to the little schoolhouses, talking like a professor, explaining our platform. We were lucky if the collection gave us enough for gas to get to the next place. We encouraged questions, and people asked us if it was true we were going to take their farms, like the Soviets in Russia, and did we believe in God."

"To accept the principle that "all power proceeds from the barrel of a gun" is to accept a society which will be dominated by those with the biggest guns."

"We are not anti-American. we do not dislike Americans though we abhor American imperialism in all its manifestations. But then, so do many Americans. Many of them have said that even more forthrightly than we have, and many of them have suffered more than any of us for their plain speaking."

"I am proud that my daughter believes, as I do, that hungry children should be fed whether they are Black Panthers or White Republicans""

"In Washington they have their hawks and doves and in Ottawa we have our parrots."

"I felt something like the man on the resurrection morning who was reading his own tombstone and said either someone is an awful liar or I'm in the wrong hole."

""My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea." - Tommy Douglas 1961."

"Those who want to burn books are either afraid of the ideas contained within the covers or they haven't the courage to stand up for the views which they themselves profess to hold."

"We must never underestimate our opponents; nor should we forget that the closer we come to reaching our objectives, the more vicious and forthright will their opposition become."

"The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad."

"The greatest way to defend democracy is to make it work."

"'My dream is for people around the world to look up and to see Canada like a little jewel sitting at the top of the continent.' To his daughter Shirley Douglas, 1951"