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1 " It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? " We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast. "
2 " It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us—even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so—turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and political experience are ill protected against the illusions of selfishness and fear; without courage, compassion for mankind and the spirit of sacrifice, the ever-thwarted advance toward an historical ideal of generosity and fraternity is not conceivable. "
― Jacques Maritain , Christianity and Democracy and the Rights of Man and Natural Law
3 " Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and their delusions are their own bible story. To break them free, is to break their faith in signs. That is why so many feel lost. "
― Shannon L. Alder
4 " Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.The man feels a great fraternity with those birds. He feels he carries, like them, a shredded inheritance, and he is too concussed to pass anything on. "
― Rana Dasgupta , Solo
5 " But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue. "
― Michael Chabon , The Yiddish Policemen's Union
6 " Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned. "
― John Steinbeck , East of Eden
7 " The irony of Christianity is that believers get so angry, and self righteous toward other Christians who sin differently than they do. Christianity is like one large fraternity where brother and sisterhood is tested by hazing. "
8 " I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed... "
― Frédéric Bastiat , The Law
9 " From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their own. "
― Dean Koontz , Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6)
10 " The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms. "
― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline
11 " But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.(" New York Blues" ) "
12 " [A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy. "
― Azar Nafisi , The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
13 " Endurance over-goaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition. "
― Charlotte Brontë , Shirley
14 " To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while society fraternity is based on resemblances.The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases. "
― Remy de Gourmont , The Book of Masks
15 " There’s a vast fraternity of record collectors, and the record store was their hub. There was not a lot of information on these groups or the labels so you’d gather [there] and it would be like a library. - Lenny Kaye quoted "
― , Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital and Back Again
16 " Of a sudden he felt that fraternity life was the only way to exist at college. How could he have doubted? (126) "
― Ferrol Sams , The Whisper of the River (Porter Osborne Jr, #2)
17 " To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe. "
― Henry Ward Beecher
18 " I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers. "
19 " Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. "
20 " In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption. "