Anna Akhmatova Quotes

The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.

One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die.

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.

I cannot belong to a nation which permits such barbarities as stoning to death and amputation - I don't care what religion it is.

In that first blow to the deaf walls of those who have everything, the blood of our people, our blood, ran generously to wash away injustice. To live, we die. Our dead once again walked the way of truth. Our hope was fertilized with mud and blood.

I say that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty.

I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.

Spare all I have, and take my life.

Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.

Mexicans, I die with honour, and not as a traitor. That stain I will not bequeath to my children and their posterity; I am not a traitor, no.

... not peace at any price. There is a peace more destructive to the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body. Chains are worse than bayonets.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man,--who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, in the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose!

I am proud to have lied. Lying under torture is not easy. In the face of torture, a person with dignity lies. Enduring torture is very difficult ... The pain is unbearable; you can not imagine how. I am proud to have lied, because I saved my comrades from the same torture and from death.

He that offereth sacrifice of the goods of the poor is as one that sacrificeth the son in the presence of his father.

Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.

Nothing is more inspiring to see how poor and suffering people, living under conditions incomparably worse than we endure, continue quietly and unpretentiously with courageous and committed struggle for justice and dignity.

The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man.

Death with honor is better than life... life with dishonor.

I'd rather die standing than live on my knees.

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

As much as the world has an instinct for evil and is a breeding ground for genocide, holocaust, slavery, racism, war, oppression, and injustice, the world has an even greateer instinct for goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love.