Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes

Freedom is not a self-preserving gift. It has to be earned, and it has to be protected.

All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.

A pure Democracy, by which I mean a Society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

Love consumes us only in the measure of our self-surrender.

Founded on the principles of private initiative, entrepreneurship and self-employment, underpinned by the values of democracy, equality and solidarity, the co-operative movement can help pave the way to a more just and inclusive economic order.

Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces & giving up your soul

Love is the only thing worth fighting for.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.

It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history . . . . [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.

A bruxis. That was the one wish more powerful than a gavriel, and its trade value was singular: The only way to purchase one was with one’s own teeth. All of them, self-extracted.

Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers in the sea.

An easy, non-self-denying life will never be one of power.

You try to learn who you are. You work hard. You've either got it or you don't when it comes to writing books. And you tend to only get these things if you want them, and want them to the exclusion of everything else.

No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.

Self-government by the whole people is the teleologic idea. The republican form of government is the noblest and the best, as it is the latest.

As John Adams said, all democracies will eventually self-destruct. We seem to be doing it very quickly.

Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer

perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch.

To what will love not stoop!

I will probably die singing.

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it.