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Thoughts on walls

Published: Nov 14, 2015 06:59:06 AM IST
Updated: Nov 14, 2015 09:10:23 AM IST
Thoughts on walls
Image: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur

“We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
— Isaac Newton
 
“That city is well fortified which has a wall of men instead of brick.”
—Lycurgus
 

“The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.”
— Huey Newton

“Even paradise could become a prison if one had enough time to take notice of the walls.”
— Morgan Rhodes
 
“Sometimes our walls exist just to see who has the strength to knock them down.”
— Darnell Lamont Walker
 

“When the wind rises, some people build walls. Others build windmills.”
— Chinese proverb
 
“George Bush taking credit for the Wall coming down is like the rooster taking credit for the
sun rising.”
— Al Gore
 
“A boundary is not that at which something stops,  but that from which something begins.”
— Martin Heidegger
 
“The strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them.”
— Genghis Khan
 
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, ‘This is mine’, and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 
“[Walls] show that politicians have reached the end of their ideas about what to do about a difficult situation with a neighbour… They can’t think what else to do.”
— Frederick Taylor
 
“The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”
— JRR Tolkien
 
“You have a 12-foot fence. You know what’ll happen? Thirteen-foot ladders.”
— Bill Richardson
 
“The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy.”
— Jim Rohn
 
“I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.”
— Gustav Mahler
 
“If you keep running into the same wall over and over again, turn.”
— Crystal DeLarm Clymer

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
—GK Chesterton

(This story appears in the 27 November, 2015 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)

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