Hostility Quotes

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!
They want us to hate.
They want us to hate 'the other'.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!
They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!
They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that we will never be afraid,
we will never hate
and we will never be silent
for life is ours!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography

“The Christian must treat his enemy as a brother, and requite his hostility with love. His behavior must be determined not by the way others treat him, but by the treatment he himself receives from Jesus; it has only one source, and that is the will of Jesus.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“All attempts to create something admirable are the weapons of evil. You may think you are practising benevolence and righteousness, but in effect you will be creating a kind of artificiality. Where a model exists, copies will be made of it; where success has been gained, boasting follows; where debate exists, there will be outbreaks of hostility.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world.”
― Ken Keyes Jr., Handbook to Higher Consciousness

“Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most leftwing segment.
28. (fr) The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Reverence reduces hostility.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“This is how we are being governed right now, people.
Six conservative justices.
They're just doing what they want.

And what they want is retrogression,
maintenance of the status quo--
not even the current status quo,
but that
from a hundred years ago...

Liberty for me, say the privileged white men in charge,
because they can.
And, to keep everyone in their pre-Reconstruction pre-women's-rights place:
Law and order for you.

Liberty for me.
Law and order for you.”
― Shellen Lubin

“This is how we are being governed right now, people.
Six conservative justices.
They're just doing what they want.

And what they want is retrogression,
maintenance of the status quo--
not even the current status quo,
but that
from a hundred years ago.

Small government for gun ownership,
what husbands do to their families inside the home,
and rich people's taxes.
Large government for the rights of everyone else
to breathe, to work, to love, to grow,
to read, to pray or not in their own way,
to think.

Liberty for me, say the privileged white men in charge,
because they can.
And, to keep everyone in their pre-Reconstruction pre-women's-rights place:
Law and order for you.

Liberty for me.
Law and order for you.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. If a man traveling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going up hill. If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humor and modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition and hostility.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“The biggest hurdle most scapegoats face is the fear of doing something wrong by going grey rock, no contact, or upsetting the narcissist if you distance yourself. You walk on eggshells. You don’t feel safe. You don’t know from one minute to the next how the narcissist will react to you. At any moment, they can explode!”
― Dana Arcuri, Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma

“I think a lot about the word tenacity. What it takes to survive in a world that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes hostile. I’m always amazed at the body’s willingness to continue, to keep going. The heart that keeps pumping, the lungs that keep breathing, the way the will to live can outsmart those other dark voices inside.”
― Ada Limon

“This world is so full of wars and hostilities.
All parties seek for allies to defeat enemies.
I support peace effort towards mastermind
which has caused men hostile to each other.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Every major power has some widely publicized justification for its procurement and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, often including a reptilian reminder of the presumed character and cultural defects of potential enemies (as opposed to us stout fellows), or of the intentions of others, but never ourselves, to conquer the world.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I wonder if the world's getting worse, or if we're just paying more attention to the shadows.”
― Charles de Lint, Trader

“Hostility, malice, and sadism are the result of helplessness and self-loathing; that they are all produced by adaptation to a hypercritical social reality and are not attributable to innate aggression.”
― Arno Gruen

“Hate is the root of hostility.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win—a conviction with much grounding in experience—which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all?

On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect been saying), and the statement, "Whatever you do, I don't want you" (which is what racism declares). It is, in other words, both absurd and immoral to equate the despairing response of the victim with the contemptuous assertion of the oppressor. It would, moreover, be tragic if white liberals allowed verbal hostility on the part of Negroes to drive them out of the movement or to curtail their support for civil rights. The issue was injustice before black power became popular, and the issue is still injustice.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“Do not argue about what is beautiful or ugly, exalted or base, as most comparisons only lead to strife and seed of hostility among people.”
― Tomáš Gavlas, Karlaz: The Way of Freedom

“Hostility," Cal said. "It's deja vu all over again. How's your head?" "The pain comes and goes," Min said. "And then there are the voices.”
― Jennifer Crusie, Bet Me

“Now that I was learning that converting to Christianity entailed a whole lot more than pats on the back and potluck lunches in affluent North Texas churches. God and I had to have a serious conversation about how I was to handle the realities of being a Muslim convert and facing what was likely to be a hostile environment.”
― Ali Master, Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes

“Some things are so bad or painful that you’d wish them on your worst enemy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Anyway, congratulations! You’re entering
a world that’s increasingly hostile and cruel
and full of people who’ll never take you seriously
though that will be a mistake on their end.”
― Matthew Olzmann

“Forgiveness is associated with a variety of traits that are of value for personal and societal well-being. Forgiving people appear to be slightly lower in a variety of negative affects, including anger, anxiety, depression, and hostility. Forgivers also tend to endorse socially desirable attitudes and behavior, and self-ratings of the disposition to forgive correlate negatively with clinicians’ ratings of hostility and passive-aggressive behavior.”
― Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

“Hostility," Cal said. "It's deja vu all over again. How's your head?" "The pain comes and goes," Min said. "And then there are the voices.”
― Jennifer Cruise

“To be an original one must not only come up with new ideas but also Sherpa those ideas into the wider world, battling skepticism, incomprehension, and outright hostility in the process. . . .”
― Adam Grant, Originals

“I am neither here nor there
just existing and not making waves”
― Loraine Masiya Mponela