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What makes a man with a gun seem bigger
than a man with almonds?

— Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

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More quotes by Naomi Shihab Nye

Greedy men say "More!" to war
Sitting together telling stories
could change that but who will take the time?

Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020)

Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible.

I think of poets over the ages sending their voices out into the sky, leaving quiet, indelible trails.

Introduction to This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (1992)

All Naomi Shihab Nye quotes →

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From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.

Frederick Douglass The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy.

Edward Abbey Abbey's Road (1979)

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Zedong

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.

Hermann Göring Radio broadcast (1936)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Naomi Shihab Nye (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.