What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.

-- Nietzsche

---

Your work is to discover your life and with all your heart to give yourself to it.

-- Buddha

---

Patriot: the person who can holler loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

-- Mark Twain

---

If you choose the lesser of two evils you are still choosing evil.

-- Ralph Nader

---

You'll find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

-- Obi wan Kenobi

---

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

---

Happiness and enthusiasm are powerfully attractive; they draw people to you and make you successful.

-- Joan Lunden

---

The thing women have got to learn is that nobody gives you power. You just take it.

-- Roseanne Barr

---

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.

-- Florence Nightingale

---

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.

-- Henry Miller

---

To know is to be ignorant. Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.

-- J. Krishnamurti

---

If fear is cultivated it will become stronger, if faith is cultivated it will achieve mastery.

-- John Paul Jones

---

You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

-- net fortune cookie

---

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

-- Thornton Wilder

---

Did you ever notice how difficult it is to argue with someone who is not obsessed with being right?

-- Wayne Dyer

---

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.

-- Chinese proverb

---

Life may not always be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Careful what you set your heart upon, for it surely shall be yours.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.

-- Russell Lynes

---

Dreams come a size too big so that we can grow into them.

-- Josie Bisset

---

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

-- May Sarton

---

Though they be only breath, words that I command are immortal.

-- Sappho

---

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.

-- T. S. Elliot

---

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.

-- Heinrich Heine

---

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.

-- George Eliot

---

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

-- Proverbs 27:17

---

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste death but once.

-- William Shakespeare

---

Wrong must not win by technicalities.

-- Aeschylus

---

People say that what we're all seeking is the meaning of life... I think that what we're really seeking is the experience of being alive.

-- Rudyard Kipling

---

As intelligence rises, the need for stimulation also rises. For every brain, there is an optimum level of arousal that your brain wants to get to. If your brain doesn't reach that level during the day, you've got to play.

By consuming your daily quota of stimulation, you promote your psychological and spiritual growth. You can also expand your intellectual capacity. Some things have a certain amount of depth that pushes you, makes you think a little deeper than you have, makes you study a little more, makes you connect with things outside of the game environment.

When you become completely absorbed by a game that pushes you to your intellectual edges, you feel like what you've done is more deeply significant than what you would have done otherwise.

Good games are good for you. Fun is a vitamin for the mind, essential nourishment for your intellect.

-- Dan Bunten & Heidi E. H. Aycock (adapted), "Compute Magazine," January 1992

---

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

-- Mal Pancoast

---

When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.

-- William Blake

---

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

-- Fyodor Dostoevski

---

Tell the truth and then run.

-- Proverb

---

People would rather be wrong than be different.

-- Henry Jacobsen

---

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.

-- Marcus Procius Cato

---

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

-- Elbert Hubbard

---

I shall never believe that god plays dice with the universe.

-- Albert Einstein

God not only plays dice with the universe, he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
-- Stephen Hawking

C'mon seven!
-- Richard Feynman

---

The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage -- and act accordingly.

-- Corra May White Harris

---

The number of arguments is unimportant unless some of them are correct.

-- Ralph Hartley

---

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.

-- unknown

---

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

-- Walter Anderson

---

And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

-- Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet"

---

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.

-- Sir Thomas Browne (1605 - 1682)

---

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.

-- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

---

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand -- and melting like a snowflake.

-- Marie Beynon Ray

---

See what no one sees. See what everyone chooses not to see out of fear, or conformity, or laziness. See the whole world anew! Each day!

-- Arthur Mendelson, from the movie "Patch Adams"

---

The world is my country; to do good is my religion.

-- Thomas Paine

---

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

-- Frank Zappa

---

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.

-- Eugene S. Wilson

---

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

-- Fellini

---

For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

-- Isaiah 55:12

---

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

-- Aldous Huxley

---

The Riddle of Epicurus
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

---

The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.

-- Rita Mae Brown, from "Venus Envy"

---

We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness.

-- Thucydides

---

Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I have my doubts about the former.

-- Albert Einstein

---

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

-- Aleister Crowley

---

All men by nature desire knowledge.

-- Aristotle

---

If you are not for yourself, who will be for you?
If you are for yourself, then what are you?
If not now, when?

-- net fortune cookie

---

Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You can risk loving another, or you can guarantee no love in your life.

-- unknown

---

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

-- David Hume

---

Walking a straight path is difficult for those who are crooked.

-- unknown

---

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

-- Marian Anderson

---

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

-- Maya Angelou

---

I don't believe in marriage. It's bloody impractical to love, honor and obey. If it weren't, you wouldn't have to sign a contract.

-- Katharine Hepburn

---

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.

-- Harvey Fierstein

---

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself.

-- Frances Ward Weller

---

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

-- Martin Luther King Jr.

---

Come fill the cup and in the fire of spring
Your winter garment of repentence fling.
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter -- and the bird is on the wing.

-- Omar Khayyam

---

[I]it is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that 'so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.' It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

---

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

-- Abraham Lincoln

---

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.

-- Eugene S. Wilson

---

When we truly care for ourselves, it becomes possible to care far more profoundly about other people.

-- Eda LeShan

---

Man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation; he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself.

-- Alexander Walker

---

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

-- Timothy Leary

---

You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her.

-- unknown

---

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

-- Betty Naomi Friedan

---

The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

-- Franklin P. Adams

---

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

-- E. M. Forster

---

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

-- James A. Michener

---

Small communities grow great through harmony, great ones fall to pieces through discord.

-- Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Roman historian

---

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

To live in dialogue with another is to live twice. Joys are doubled by exchange and burdens are cut in half.

-- Wishart

---

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

-- Dr. Seuss

---

How is it that a society that will watch "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire" in huge numbers would reject unions between committed couples? Which is the greater mockery of marriage?

-- Adrian Walker, "The Boston Globe," 3/9/00

---

The popular notion of love and marriage is that they are synonymous. ... Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on superstition.

-- Emma Goldman, 1911

---

[W]e are living in a sick Society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them.

-- William L. Comer

---

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

-- Clarence Darrow

---

Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. The latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean.

-- Albert Schweitzer

---

He has the most who is most content with the least.

-- Diogenes the Cynic

---

Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.

-- Diogenes the Cynic

---

Show me a hero and I'll tell you a tragedy.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

---

The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.

-- Emily Dickinson

---

There are few people more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be thought so.

-- anon.

---

A human being is a part of a whole, call by us: universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-- Albert Einstein
[note! this quote may not be correct]

---

How ignorant is he who knows all but not himself.

-- Valividar, Rosicrucian

---

Live with intention.

-- anon.

---

Every wall is a door.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

After the dream, the passion wrought by it remains.

-- Dante, Paradiso Canto from the "Divine Comedy"

---

Beauty, truth, friendship, love, creation -- these are the great values of life. We can't prove them, or explain them, yet they are the most stable things in our lives.

-- Jesse Herman Holmes

---

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

-- Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.

---

[O]ne thing I know; the only ones among us who will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

-- Albert Schweitzer

---

George Washington, when asked if he thought God was on his side, reportedly replied, "It is not that God should be on our side, but that we be on His."

---

Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.

-- R. Drabek

---

To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets.

-- Mencius, philosopher (c. 380-289 BCE)

---

The God you worship is the God you deserve.

-- Joseph Campbell

---

As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-- Marianne Williamson

---

Awareness, in and of itself, is curative.

-- Robert Marrone

---

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.

-- Rumi

---

Make no judgements where you have no compassion.

-- Anne McCaffrey

---

Practice compassion. Live with intention.

-- anon.

---

The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.

-- Tao Te Ching

---

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

-- Booker T. Washington, "Up from Slavery"

---

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

-- Henry Ford

---

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

-- Eric Hoffer

---

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.

-- John Wooden

---

All learning has an emotional base.

-- Plato

---

I never try to teach my students anything. I only try to create an environment in which they can learn.

-- Albert Einstein

---

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

-- Alfred North Whitehead

---

Anyone who makes a distinction between games and education clearly does not know the first thing about either one.

-- Marshall McLuhan

---

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out.

-- Montaigne

---

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

-- Benjamin Franklin, "Poor Richard's Almanac," 1758

---

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

-- Galileo Galilei

---

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.

-- Albert Einstein

---

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be... a Christian.

-- Mark Twain

---

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

-- Seneca the Younger

---

No gods, no masters.

-- Margaret Sanger

---

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

[H]eaven for climate and hell for society.

-- Mark Twain, Tammany & Croker speech

---

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.

-- Carl Sagan

---

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

-- Bertrand Russell

---

[I]f devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater ... more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking ....

-- Ayn Rand

---

The Obligation of Subjects to the Sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasts, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. -- Hobbes, "Leviathan" (ch. 21)

---

The branches of your intelligence grow new leaves in the wind of listening.

-- Rumi

---

Though all under heaven be at peace, if the arts of war be forgotten there is peril.

-- Chinese Proverb

---

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.

-- Raymond Chandler

---

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

-- Samuel Johnson

---

Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Seeker of Truth, follow no path. All paths lead where. Truth is here.

-- e.e. cummings

---

People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way -- even when these stories concern their own native countries.

-- Thucydides of Athens

---

I think it's better to have a regular sort of life, and love somebody when they're boiling cabbages and getting in tempers and curling up beside you in bed every night. That's a much better kind of love than a pretty one that ends in sad and lovely paintings.

-- "Pretty Good Year, Afternoon Light"

---

To live is to love; all reason is against it; instinct is for it.

-- Samuel Butler

---

Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.

-- Frederick J. Pohl

---

What an immense mass of evil must result ... from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.

-- Tolstoy

---

Would you care to view the ruins of my good intentions?

-- net fortune cookie

---

[T]est everything; hold on to the good....

-- 1 Thessalonians 5:21

---

Be open to other people -- they may enrich your dream.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Listen to people with your heart instead of your ears and you will hear the truth.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

The anger you project onto others can destroy you.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Be true to yourself and others, and you'll know the difference between right and wrong.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

You can only help someone when you know there’s a problem.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Together, love and forgiveness are the golden keys to a peaceful soul and a happy heart.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Everyone's life is made up of choices. If you are unhappy, it is because you choose to be. You are the only person who can change that.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians.

-- A. V. Dicey, 19th C English jurist

---

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

-- Albert Einstein

---

If you think that the distance Christ had to come to take the likeness of man is not so great as that from man to gorilla, then you don't know men. Or gorillas. Or God.

-- from Dian Fossey's eulogy

---

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

-- Richard Feynman

---

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

-- Larry Niven

And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!
-- Arthur C. Clarke

---

Real historical writers probe factual uncertainties, but they do not invent convenient facts and they do not ignore inconvenient facts. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.

-- William Kelleher Storey, "Writing History"

---

Do one thing every day that scares you.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

May you live all the days of your life.

-- unknown

---

When in despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won; there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.

-- M. K. Gandhi

---

Power corrupts but so does weakness. And absolute weakness corrupts absolutely.

-- Josef Joffe, editor of "Die Zeit"

---

Optimism is an intellectual choice.

-- Diana Scheider

---

He who is most reluctant to make a promise is most likely to keep it.

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

---

Qui male agit odit lucem.
(He who behaves badly hates the light.)

-- John 3:20

---

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

-- Adlai Stevenson

---

[P.T.] Barnum’s great discovery was not how easy it is to deceive the public, but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived.

-- Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America"

---

If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the kitchen.

-- anon.

---

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

-- anon.

---

Of course I don't look busy. I did it right the first time.

-- anon.

---

Commitment is the spark that lights the fire.

-- unknown

---

Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.

-- W. Clement Stone

---

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.

-- James Q. Wilson

---

Before the world finds a place for you, find a place for yourself in the world.

-- Anonymous

---

No dream comes true until you wake up and go to work.

-- Anonymous

---

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.

-- Anna Louise Strong

---

Some reckon time by stars,
And some by hours;
Some measure days by dreams
And some by flowers;
My heart alone records
My days and hours.

-- Madison J. Cawein, from "Some Reckon Time by Stars"

---

Anyone too busy to say thank you will get fewer and fewer chances to do so.

-- Harvey McKay

---

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that but the really great people make you feel you too can be great.

-- Mark Twain

---

This is a time for a loud voice, open speech, and fearless thinking. I rejoice that I live in such a splendidly disturbing time.

-- Helen Keller

---

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

-- Neil Armstrong

---

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

-- Carl Jung

---

Things won are done; the joy lies in the doing.

-- William Shakespeare

---

But there is such a thing as genuine love, which is always considerate. Its distinguishing characteristic is, in fact, regard for personal dignity. Its effect is to stimulate self-respect in the other person. Its concern is to help the loved one become their true self. In a mysterious way such love finds its truest realization in its power to stimulate the other to attain their highest self-realization.

-- Romano Guardini

---

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

-- Herbert Spencer (1891)

---

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-- P.J. O'Rourke (1993)

---

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

---

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.

-- Pericles (430 B.C.)

---

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

---

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

-- Peter Drucker

---

It is amazing how much more moral people can be if they know that immorality will have painful consequences.

-- Clayton Cramer, "Rights & Revolution," writing about the FBI resolving the Montana Freeman siege without killing anyone... perhaps because there were armed U.S. citizens there watching, who were concerned about another Waco

---

An eye for an eye will blind the world.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

---

Never offend with style when you can offend with substance.

-- Sam Brown

---

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.

-- Albert Einstein

---

Conformism brings uniformity rather than unity.

-- Pope John Paul II
(much to my surprise, considering his recent incorrect, unpleasant, and anti-American pontifications regarding priestly pedophilia. I wonder when he said this? Must have been a while ago)

---

Freedom has always been an expensive thing.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

Real beauty is my aim.

-- Mohandas Gandhi

---

Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.

-- Mark Twain

---

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

-- Carl Gustav Jung

---

Knowledge is power, but power is just potential.

-- Robert Simpson, Jr.

---

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past.

-- George Orwell

---

Whatever occurs from love is always beyond good and evil.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

---

I have always thought of a myth as something that never was but is always happening.

-- Jean Houston, "The Possible Human"

---

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.

-- Joseph Campbell

---

And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?!"

-- net fortune cookie

---

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

-- George Orwell, author of "1984"

---

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

So heavy is the chain of wedlock that it needs two to carry it, and sometimes three.

-- Alexandre Dumas

---

In a system of majoritarian rule with no protected rights, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for lunch.

-- Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr., in the "Wall Street Journal"

---

Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty:
it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear:
it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its
votaries live in confidence, equality, and un-reserve.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

---

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

---

English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

-- net fortune cookie

---

No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

-- Margaret H. Sanger

---

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?

-- Kelvin Throop III

---

To get the most out of being single, a woman has to develop a skill that is seemingly harder to come by these days than a good man: the ability to be happy even when other people are convinced you can't be.

-- Laura Miller, "State of the single woman," Salon.com

---

[L]iberty is a practice, not a condition.

-- Michel Foucault

---

Even as they strike you down, you will remember, humanity is not our enemy. The only thing worthy of you is compassion ... Hatred will never let you face the beast in human beings. One day, when you face the beast alone, with your courage intact, your eyes kind ... out of your smile will bloom a flower. And ... on the long, rough road, the sun and the moon will continue to shine.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk; written in 1965, during the Vietnam War

---

They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote.

-- Rep. Ron Paul, TX, on how few Congresscritters saw the USA-PATRIOT Bill before voting overwhelmingly to impose a police state

---

The more you love, the more you can love -- and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of the majority who are decent and just.

-- Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough For Love)

---

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied: real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring: real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. ‘Imaginative literature,’ therefore, is either boring, or immoral, or a mixture of both.

-- Simone Weil

---

Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.
The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get.
Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

-- USMC 'humorous rules of gunfighting'

---

The struggle is always worthwhile, if the end be worthwhile and the means honorable; foreknowledge of defeat is not sufficient reason to withdraw from the contest.

-- Steven Brust, "Five Hundred Years After"

---

To teach is to learn twice.

-- Joseph Joubert

---

I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

-- Aristotle

---

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said -- grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"?

Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

-- Carl Sagan

---

All professions are to a certain extent a conspiracy against the laity.

-- anon.

---

I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest.

-- Alexandre Dumas (fils)

---

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

-- Henry Ford

---

Freedom is nothing else but the chance to do better.

-- Camus

---

Until you have been challenged, you don't know you're right.

-- Dr. Henry Heimlich

---

It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

-- unknown (but I wish I did know!)

---

[D]o anything you wish to do, have anything you wish to have, be anything you wish to be.

-- Robert Collier

---

Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want.

-- Jim Rohn

---

The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn't like to do.

-- Thomas Edison

---

Some people can't see the solution. Others can't see the problem.

-- G.K. Chesterton

---

The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer everybody else up.

-- Mark Twain

---

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

-- Heywood Broun

---

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

---

Goals are new, forward-moving objectives. They magnetize you towards them.

-- Mark Victor Hansen

---

There is no such thing as a good excuse.

-- Dero Ames Saunders

---

Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning.

-- Winston Churchill

---

Nothing great has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe something inside them was superior to circumstances.

-- Bruce Barton

---

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling that desire.

-- Epictetus

---

A man's doubts and fears are his worst enemies.

-- William Wrigley Jr.

---

First law of debate: Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.

-- unknown

---

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

-- Franklin P. Jones

---

Feel yourself being quietly drawn by the deeper pull of what you truly love.

-- Rumi

---

Those who hear not the music, think the dancers mad.

-- unknown

---

Many people resent being treated like the person they really are.

-- unknown

---

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

-- R. W. Emerson

---

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.

-- Frank Hubbard

---

Life garners experience, and nothing replaces experience -- not talent nor good intentions.

-- Melissa Drake

---

The easiest way for me to grow as a person is to surround myself with people smarter than I am.

-- net fortune cookie

---

When you're in love... it shows.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Under everyone's hard shell is someone who wants to be appreciated and loved.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Ignoring the facts does not change them.

-- net fortune cookie

---

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere 'being.'

-- Carl Jung

---

Girls are being taught in school how to put a condom on a boy, but they don't know how to talk to them!

-- Anne Bernays, granddaughter of Sigmund Freud

---

Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

-- Thomas Jefferson

---

The so-called dark side is not wholly an evil or negative place or force; after all, some things remain in the shadows because we've placed them there out of fear or squeamishness.

-- Jay Kinney

---

Stars are not seen by sunshine.

-- Spanish Proverb

---

Without darkness there are no dreams.

-- Karla Kuban

---

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

-- African Proverb

---

Why are we scared to die? Do any of us remember being scared when we were born?

-- Trevor Kay

---

It is not enough for us to have an abstract, intellectual concept of our common community; we need to have places that enable us to go there and feel it as a real sensation. There's a reason they held that rally in Tiananmen Square, not a parking lot. And of course the same is true of other, humbler, values.

Anything less makes us live in either a fantasy world or an abstraction with no emotional substance to give it depth, resonance, stability, and a sense of being shared with others.

-- Robert Locke, "America’s Greatest Architect Is A Conservative," from FrontPageMagazine.com, 6 May 2001

---

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

-- E.B. White

---

Ultimately, we become what we love.

-- Kenneth L. Woodward, "Why We Need Hell, Too" from Newsweek, 12 Aug 2002

---

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

When I dare to be powerful -- to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

-- Audre Lord

---

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

-- Aesop

---

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular.

-- net fortune cookie

---

The trouble with political jokes is that too often, they get elected.

-- anon.

---

A sincere smile warms the coldest of hearts.

-- anon.

---

What ever happens with us, your body will haunt mine.

-- Adrienne Rich

---

Comedy is tragedy plus time.

-- Carol Burnett

---

The best portions of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.

-- William Wordsworth

---

Life is too short to be small.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

---

Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.

-- John Henry Cardinal Newman

---

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

-- Helen Keller

---

A friend is one who makes me do my best.

-- Oswald Chambers

---

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

'Tis better to be alone than in bad company.

-- George Washington

---

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.

-- Ben Johnson

---

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

-- William Blake

---

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.

-- Eric Hoffer

---

Happiness to me means constant growth.

-- Eddie Albert

---

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

-- Plato

---

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.

-- Benjamin Franklin

---

Be a friend to thyself, and others will be so too.

-- Thomas Fuller

---

Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.

-- Publilius Syrus

---

Unshared joy is an unlighted candle.

-- Spanish proverb

---

The older you get, the more you realize that kindness is synonymous with happiness.

-- Lionel Barrymore

---

If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got.

-- Anonymous

---

Tell me with whom thou art found and I will tell thee who thou art.

-- Goethe

---

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

-- Marcus Aurelius

---

At seventy, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that "this too will pass."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

-- Karl Barth

---

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

-- Marcus Aurelius

---

Life is what we make it. Always has been. Always will be.

-- Grandma Moses

---

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

-- Aristotle

---

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

-- Nietzsche

---

He who wants to kill most thoroughly, laughs. Not by wrath but by laughter does one kill.

-- Nietzsche

---

Whatever you do, do it with all your heart and soul.

-- Bernard Baruch

---

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

-- Nietzsche

---

Happiness is a habit. Cultivate it.

-- Elbert Hubbard

---

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

-- Mark Twain

---

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

-- Marie Curie

---

My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself.

-- Eartha Kitt

---

Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life.

-- Norman Cousins

---

The heart that loves is always young.

-- Greek proverb

---

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

-- Kafka

---

Keep company with those who may make you better.

-- English saying

---

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

-- Jonathan Swift

---

Get the advice of everybody whose advice is worth having -- they being very few -- then do what you think best yourself.

-- Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish poet & playwright

---

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.

-- Rene Descartes

---

The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it.

-- Glaser and Way

---

You are your problem, and you are your solution.

-- Bill Bailey

---

Your Truth will not be my Truth!

-- Bruce Lee

---

We childproofed our home 3 years ago and they're still getting in!

-- net fortune cookie

---

Advice for the day: If you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do what it says on the aspirin bottle: "Take two Aspirin," and "Keep away from children."

-- net fortune cookie

---

Where there is much light there is also much shadow.

-- Goethe

---

If music be the food of love, play on.

-- Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 1

---

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

-- Ayn Rand

---

Everyone has problems. Everyone. But successful people figure out how to solve theirs. That's the difference between successful and unsuccessful people.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet, and the winds long to play with your hair.

-- Kahlil Gibran

---

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

-- Josh Billing

---

Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors.

One would look in vain for reasons to justify it, by differences in physical constitution, intelligence, moral sensibility. This inequality has no other source but the abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms.

-- Marquis de Condorcet

---

The cynic is his own worst enemy. It requires far less skill to run a wrecking company than it does to be an architect.

-- U.S. Andersen

---

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

-- Saul Alinsky

---

We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

-- net fortune cookie

---

I understood that within the soul from its primordial beginnings there has been a desire for light and an irrepressible urge to rise out of the primal darkness. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

-- C.G. Jung

---

What we wish, that we readily believe.

-- Demosthenes

---

In Blythe, California, a city ordinance declares that a person must own at least two cows before he can wear cowboy boots in public.

-- net fortune cookie
[I feel so much more... genuine now! ;-)]

---

You don't always win your battles, but it's good to know you fought.

-- Lauren Bacall

---

Blasphemy is ignoring your dreams.

-- srini

---

Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.

-- Edmund Brown, Jr.

---

Garbage In -- Gospel Out

-- net fortune cookie

---

Today when a man gets married he gets a home, a housekeeper, a cook, a cheering squad, and another paycheck. When a woman marries, she gets a boarder.

-- net fortune cookie

---

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't.

-- Ernest Rutherford

---

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

-- Herbert Prochnow

---

People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

-- Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Grey," 1891

---

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Graduating in four years is like leaving the party at ten o'clock.

-- graffiti on a wall at Chico State

---

A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Old age is too high a price to pay for maturity.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Sure the world is full of trouble, but as long as we have people undoing trouble we have a pretty good world.

-- Helen Keller

---

God has granted to every people a prophet in its own tongue.

-- The Koran

---

Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.

-- Seneca, "Epistolae ad Lucilium, Epis. XLVII, 11"

---

Believe you have it, and you have it.

-- Latin Proverb

---

Love conquers all.

-- Virgil, "Eclogues, X"

---

Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life. The great enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.

-- Helen Keller

---

By the accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love he may rule the world forever.

-- Lao-tze, "The Simple Way"

---

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

-- Bhagavad-Gita

---

Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it... or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.

-- Gautama Buddha

---

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.

-- Aristotle

---

There is a difference between him who does no misdeeds because of his own conscience and him who is kept from wrong-doing because of the presence of others.

-- The Talmud

---

The broad-minded see the truth in different religions; the narrow-minded see only their differences.

-- Lao-tze

---

Good and kind people outnumber all the others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant.

Thus in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry: every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ordinary effects of a vast majority.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, in Britain's "Leftist Guardian" in the wake of 9-11

---

The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.

-- the "Colonel," in actuality a damaged computer passing the Turing test, from Metal Gear Solid 2

---

Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.

-- "Solid Snake," from Metal Gear Solid 2

---

These are the times that try men's souls.... Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

-- Thomas Paine

---

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face... You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

A nation is not conquered
Until the hearts of its women are on the ground.
Then it is finished,
No matter how brave its warriors
Or how strong their weapons.

-- Cheyenne proverb

---

In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy -- or the confession thereof -- is an end in itself.

-- Ken Silverstein

---

I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church.

-- Morris Dees, primary fundraiser for the "Southern Poverty Law Center"

---

The great thing about the internet is its leveling effect; online all opinions are equally worthless.

-- Grant Morrison

---

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

-- Robert Heller

---

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will -- his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.

-- Albert Schweitzer

---

And no, reason and logic are not masculine instruments of oppression. To suggest that they are is an insult to women.

-- Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow"

---

Self-education is a continuing source of pleasure to me, for the more I know, the fuller my life is and the better I appreciate my own existence.

-- Isaac Asimov, "My Favorite Writing"

---

Computer programmers tend, by and large, to be quirky and highly individualistic. Trying to organize or manage such awkward characters is normally as thankless as herding cats.

-- John Naughton, "A Brief History of the Future"

---

Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.

-- Warren Bennis

---

When some people discover the truth, they just can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.

-- Richard Bach, "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"

---

They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

-- Carl Sagan

---

Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a car.

-- net fortune cookie

---

In a free country we punish men for crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.

-- Harry Truman

---

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells "Can't you remember anything I told you?" and lets fly with a club.

-- John W. Campbell

---

Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.

-- Frederick Pohl

---

Gentleness is not a weakness... gentleness is power under control.

-- unknown

---

Ignorance leads to fear. Fear causes anger. Anger gets you into trouble. Pride keeps you there.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right, for the minority which is right will one day be the majority; Always be afraid to stand with the majority which is wrong, for the majority which is wrong will one day be the minority.

-- William Jennings Bryan

---

Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.

-- Dick Brandon

---

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

-- Robert Frost

---

The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give to those who do not have enough.
Man's way is different.
He takes from those who do not have enough to give to those who already have too much.
What man has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the man of Tao.

Therefore the sage works without recognition.
He achieves what has to be done without dwelling on it.
He does not try to show his knowledge.

-- Tao Te Ching, part of verse 77

---

Live as those who have the Self as lamp, the Self as refuge, and no other.

-- Gautama Buddha

---

I am awake.

-- Gautama Buddha

---

It is your concern when your neighbor's wall is on fire.

-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)

---

It is necessary, therefore, to obey the universal; but although the Logos is universal most people live as though they had a private understanding.[v.2]
Listening to the Logos and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are One.[v.3]
When they are spoken to, the ignorant are like the deaf: they bear witness to the proverb that when present they are absent.[v.6]
Human nature does not have true judgment, but divine nature does.[v.12]
To God all things are beautiful, good and just, but human beings have supposed some things to be unjust, others just.[v.13]
A hidden connection is stronger than an apparent one.[v.14]
Nature prefers to hide.[v.15]
Good and bad are the same.[v.20]
The sun is new each day.[v.32]
To be wise is one thing: to know the thought that directs all things through all things.[v.34]
The One, the only wisdom, does and yet does not consent to be called Zeus.[v.35]
Human beings are carried away by every new theory.[v.45]
Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, living their death and dying their life.[v.46]
Those who sleep also share in the work of the cosmos.[v.50]
I searched my nature.[v.53]
Ethos anthropoi daimon (For human beings, character is the divine force).[v.54]

-- Heraclitus, from Richard Geldard's "Remembering Heraclitus"

---

When myths lose their meaning and understanding gives way to fairy tale, language must necessarily change accordingly, and philosophy takes up the cause of meaning.

-- Richard Geldard

---

To define is to confine.

-- Richard Geldard

---

A Fanatic is someone who doubles his effort while losing his aim.

-- Chuck Jones (?)

---

We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell.

-- Karl Popper

---

Marriage is important when you're afraid, insecure, or need something. It's possible to be married just by being together.

-- Tina Turner, 60 year old singer who has cohabited with her partner Erwin Bach, a record company executive, for the last 14 years

---

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

-- Katharine Hepburn

---

It may be that if the job description of wife were spelled out in full no sensible woman would apply.

-- Rebecca Mead, "Conditional Surrender," The New Yorker, April 2, 2001

---

[The] idealization of marriage is typical of those who are excluded from it: priests, gays, adolescents. It shows an extraordinary willful blindness.

-- Michael Warner, "The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life" (1999)

---

I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.

-- Queen Elizabeth I

---

Morality consists of suspecting other people of not being legally married.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

-- Ellen Key, Swedish social feminist circa 1900

---

"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?

-- unknown

---

Let no one ever say that marriages are made in Heaven; the gods would not commit so great an injustice!

-- Queen Marguerite of Valois (wife of Henry IV of France)

---

Marriage is an institution. I'm not ready for an institution.

-- Mae West

---

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

-- Isadora Duncan

---

What it boils down to is this: Marriage feels wrong. My relationship with Hugh feels very, very right. Marriage is irrelevant to the daily hubbub of our relationship. Marriage is like lipstick or high heels or party dresses: so incredibly foreign and so clearly the trappings of someone else's idea of womanhood.

-- Rachel Fudge on why she hasn't married her partner of seven years; "Why I Don't," an essay in the book "Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership" (2001)

---

[A] mistake of great historical significance has been made in modern times in the construction of a doctrine which treated traditions as the detritus of the forward movement of society. ... [A] life without piety, including piety to the past, courts grief and does damage to the life of the living individual.

-- Edward Shils

---

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

-- Rebecca West

---

You're never too old to become younger.

-- Mae West

---

Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.

---

The help people need most urgently is help in admitting that they need help.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

-- Lazarus Long

---

Justice without mercy is not justice.

-- Clarence Darrow

---

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

-- George Orwell

---

When I'm old, I don't want them to say of me, "She's so charming." I want them to say, "Be careful, I think she's armed."

-- G. Stoddart

---

The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Because most people do not read books, reading is sometimes labeled elitist. But, in fact, it is no more elitist than walking -- less so, because the government pays for you to learn to read, whereas you have to pick up walking by yourself. Nor are books just for the moneyed. You can get them free from public libraries. Some people are too lazy to read or walk, but that has nothing to do with elitism.

-- British critic John Carey

---

If hate is what you want to censor, then shut down the churches: No artist has ever produced so much bile and hate as spew forth from pulpits in the name of God.

-- Brad Fraser, author of "Unidentified Human Remains," commenting on the furor surrounding Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibit

---

Fear is the greatest salesman.

-- Robert Klein

---

Professional wrestling: ballet for the common man.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.

-- Epicurus (341 BCE - 271 BCE)

---

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.

-- Jack London

---

A proper fairy tale is anything but an untruth; it goes to the very heart of truth. It goes to the hearts of men and women and speaks of the things it finds there: fear, courage, greed, compassion, loyalty, betrayal, despair, and wonder. It speaks of these things in a symbolic language that slips into our dreams, our unconscious, steeped in rich archetypal images.

-- Terri Windling, "White as Snow: Fairy Tales and Fantasy," in Snow White, Blood Red

---

A good fairy tale, or fantastic novel, may indeed lead us through a door from daily life to the magic lands of Once Upon a Time, but it should then return us back again with a sharper vision of our own world. Instead of replacing real life, good fantasy whets our taste for it and opens our eyes to its wonders.

The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairy tale forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the depths of our unconscious.

To travel to the wood, to face its dangers, is to emerge transformed by this experience.

-- Terri Windling, "White as Snow: Fairy Tales and Fantasy," in Snow White, Blood Red

---

The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible enough to give none.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world -- even if what is published is not true.

-- Richard Bach, "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"

---

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

-- Dom Helder Camara

---

Neither slave nor tyrant.

-- Basque motto

---

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity, or compassion.

-- Saul Alinsky

---

Our bodies are our gardens -- our wills are our gardeners.

-- William Shakespeare

---

The price of greatness is responsibility.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people.

-- F. M. Hubbard

---

Satan, it will be remembered, is not a conqueror, not an exploiter. He is a tempter, a seducer, most dangerous when he smiles.

-- Bernard Lewis

---

Your motives for doing whatever good deed you may have in mind will be misinterpreted by somebody.

-- anon. from the net

---

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena... who strives valiantly, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in worthy causes. Who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement and who, at worst, if he fails, fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

-- Teddy Roosevelt

---

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

---

There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind are nothing but a dream. They are right. It is a dream. It is the American dream.

-- Archibald MacLeish

---

The Fall of man, as the Bible recounts it, is really the Fall of God.

-- Theodore Roethke, American Poet, 1937

---

...the prescriptive distinction that states that we practice religion but they practice magic should be seen for what it is, a political validation of the approved and the official against the unapproved and unofficial.

-- John Dominic Crossan

---

What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!

-- Pope Leo X

---

Rejoice with everlasting joy
[Un]ceasingly, worship in the common assembly.
Bless the one who
Wonderfully does majestic deeds, and makes known his strong hand.

-- One of the Dead Sea scrolls

---

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

-- William Blake

---

The healthy man does not torture others -- generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

-- Carl Jung (1875­1961), "Return to the Simple Life," (Zurich, May 1941)

---

Put your trust in those who are worthy.

-- net fortune cookie

---

...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.

-- St. Catherine of Siena

---

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

-- Giordano Bruno (1548 - burned at the stake 1600)

---

It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose Liberty.

-- Francis Bacon

---

Knowledge's kiss,
Given the chance,
Is twice the bliss
of ignorance.

-- unknown (mazerpriest?)

---

Henceforth I ask not good fortune -- I myself am good fortune

-- Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road"

---

There is no god; there is only the illusion you see of yourself.

-- JoeK.com

---

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

-- Peter Drucker

---

The only really decent thing to do behind a person's back is pat it.

-- from the net

---

Take it for granted, that by far the greatest part of mankind do neither analyse nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface. All have senses to be gratified, very few have reason to be applied to. Graceful utterance and action please their eyes, elegant diction tickles their ears; but strong reason would be thrown away upon them.

-- Lord Chesterfield, in a letter to his adult son, 12 February 1754

---

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's.

-- Kee Hinckley

---

Ancoro imparo
(I am still learning).

-- Michelangelo's motto (1475 - 1564)

---

Lo! Men have become the tool of their tools.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.

-- Max Horkheimer

---

[W]e must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch

---

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

-- Elie Wiesel

---

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

-- Salman Rushdie

---

Je n'ai pas besoin de cet hypothese
(Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis).

-- Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon, on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.

---

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

---

The truth is more important than the facts.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

---

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

-- Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977)

---

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

---

Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.

-- Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking he renounce Satan

---

I criticize by creation -- not by finding fault.

-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

---

There is only one nature -- the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.

-- Bill Wulf

---

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

---

The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.

-- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live

---

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)

---

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

-- Tom Clancy

---

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

-- Irving Kristol

---

Well done is better than well said.

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

---

The average person thinks he isn't.

-- Father Larry Lorenzoni

---

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

-- Sun Tzu

---

Never mistake motion for action.

-- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

---

Men have become the tools of their tools.

-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

---

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

---

The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.

-- Gloria Leonard

---

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

-- Al Capone (1899-1947)

---

The gods too are fond of a joke.

-- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

---

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

---

I am not young enough to know everything.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

---

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

-- Gail Godwin

---

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

-- Henry Kissinger (1923-)

---

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

-- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

---

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

---

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.

-- Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925

---

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

-- Will Durant

---

A witty saying proves nothing.

-- Voltaire (1694-1778)

---

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

---

Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

-- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

---

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

---

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

---

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

-- John D. Rockefeller (1874-1960)

---

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

-- Anais Nin (1903-1977)

---

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

---

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

-- Voltaire (1694-1778)

---

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

---

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

---

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

-- Plato (427-347 B.C.)

---

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.

-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

---

Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.

-- Henry Ford (1863-1947)

---

If a man does his best, what else is there?

-- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)

---

You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward. Therefore you have few friends.

-- off the web

---

As I argued in "Beloved Son," a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions -- to anything -- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with.

The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are surprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.

-- Steve Allen, comedian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of Conviction," edited by Philip Berman

---

For I can see that in the midst of death, life persists. In the midst of untruth, truth persists. In the midst of darkness, light persists.

-- Gandhi

---

The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.

-- John Adams

---

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

-- Mark Twain

---

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.

-- Maya Angelou

---

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

-- Rasselas

---

Happiness isn't having what you want, it's wanting what you have.

-- anon.

---

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.

-- G.B. Shaw

---

I guess I've been so wrapped up in playing the game that I never took time enough to figure out where the goal line was -- what it meant to win -- or even how you won.

-- Cash McCall

---

Shame is an improper emotion invented by pietists to oppress the human race.

-- Robert Preston, playing Toddy in "Victor/Victoria"

---

To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form -- and the local human passions and conditions and standards -- are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes.

-- H. P. Lovecraft

---

As for seriously-written books on dark, occult, and supernatural themes -- in all truth they don't amount to much. That is why it's more fun to invent mythical works like the 'Necronomicon' and 'Book of Eibon.'

-- H. P. Lovecraft

---

Adulthood is hell.

-- H. P. Lovecraft

---

For some, sex leads to sainthood; for others it is the road to hell... all depends on one's point of view.

-- Henry Miller

---

The difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.

-- Brendan Francis

---

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

-- Terry Pratchett

---

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

-- Plutarch

---

Fear nothing but the failure to experience your true nature.

-- Zenji

---

Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.

-- Vittorio Alfieri

---

The idea is like grass. It craves sunlight, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin

---

Science and fun cannot be separated.

-- Sir Roger Penrose

---

...that as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by an Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.

-- Benjamin Franklin

---

Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense.

-- Eric Idle

---

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

-- Graham Greene

---

Others may argue about whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper. I just want to make sure that mine doesn't end with a whine.

-- Barbara Gordon

---

I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.

-- Artur Rubenstein

---

Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them.

-- Robert G. Ingersoll

---

The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

-- Thomas Szasz

---

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

-- Amelia Earhart

---

Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.

-- Condorcet

---

All serious daring starts from within.

-- Eudora Welty

---

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

-- Anais Nin

---

What are politicians going to tell people when the Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?

-- William Simpson, A.C.L.U.

---

You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.

-- Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.

---

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

-- Thomas Merton

---

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

-- Dorothy Sayers

---

The most drastic, and usually the most effective remedy for fear is direct action.

-- William Burnham

---

Many of our fears are tissuepaper-thin, and a single courageous step would carry us through them.

-- Brendan Francis

---

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

---

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open -- into the light, out of the darkness.

-- Reba McEntire

---

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

-- Vince Lombardi

---

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.

-- Jawaharlal Nehru

---

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

-- George Eliot

---

Liberal whites need black anger to prove the persistence of racism among their unenlightened neighbors, which they alone can atone for by the noblesse oblige of liberal paternalism. Thus, to reinforce their own sense of moral superiority, they confer racial authenticity only on blacks like Damon Lynch (a provocateur), self-proclaimed angry victims of American bigotry.

-- Heather MacDonald

---

No man is free who is not master of himself.

-- Epictetus

---

discipline, passion
yoked in harness create that
rarity: power

-- anon.

---

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

-- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

---

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

---

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

-- E. F. Schumacher

---

I can trust my friends... These people force me to examine myself, encourage me to grow.

-- Cher

---

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

-- A. Whitney Griswold

---

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

-- James Thurber

---

Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.

-- Bernard M. Baruch

---

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

-- Colette

---

Practice being excited.

-- Bill Foster

---

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.

-- Saint Thomas Aquinas

---

Class is... the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.

-- Ann Landers

---

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

-- Susan Sontag

---

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

-- Abraham Lincoln

---

One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.

-- Josh Billings

---

If you deny yourself commitment, what can you do with your life?

-- Harvey Fierstein

---

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe.

-- Noah Webster

---

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

-- Thomas Jefferson, 1774, "Commonplace Book"

---

There seemed to be endless obstacles... it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.

-- Joanna Field

---

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

-- Dante

---

The Church says the Earth is Flat, But I know that it is Round, For I have seen the Shadow on the Moon, and I have more Faith in a Shadow than in the Church.

-- Magellan

---

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

-- a saying from Zimbabwe

---

Seven Deadly Social Sins:
Politics without principle
Wealth without work
Commerce without morality
Pleasure without conscience
Education without character
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice

-- Gandhi

---

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

-- Arnold Schwarzenegger

---

Change occurs when one becomes what she is, not when she tries to become what she is not.

-- Ruth P. Freedman

---

Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections.

-- Saint Francis de Sales

---

He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.

-- Napoleon

---

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

-- net fortune cookie

---

A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.

-- Marcus Aurelius

---

Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is... It's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.

-- Sir Laurence Olivier

---

Learn to see in another's calamity the ills which you should avoid.

-- Publius Syrus

---

It's weak and despicable to go on wanting things and not trying to get them.

-- Joanna Field

---

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

-- Mario Cuomo

---

I'm happier... I guess I made up my mind to be that way.

-- Merle Haggard

---

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

-- John F. Kennedy

---

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.

-- William James

---

The only way to enjoy anything in this life is to earn it first.

-- Ginger Rogers

---

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

-- Napoleon

---

Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.

-- Ella Fitzgerald

---

You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.

-- Sacha Guitry

---

If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it.

-- Anon.

---

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

-- Joaquin Setanti

---

Once harm has been done, even a fool understands it.

-- Homer

---

Quigley's Law: Whoever has any authority over you, no matter how small, will atttempt to use it.

---

The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.

-- Lady Bird Johnson

---

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

-- Albert Einstein

---

Rarely do people communicate; they just take turns talking.

-- unknown

---

Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.

-- Carol Burnett

---

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an unchartered land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

-- Helen Keller

---

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

-- Michael Evans

---

Miseranda vita qui se mitui quam amari malunt.
(Pitiful are the lives of those who would rather be feared than loved.)

-- Cicero(?)

---

No one grows old by living, only by losing interest in living.

-- Marie Beynon Ray

---

'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

If we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.

-- Samuel Adams

---

I never give them hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it is hell.

-- Harry S. Truman

---

Fate loves the fearless.

-- James Russell Lowell

---

The education of a man is never complete until he dies.

-- Robert E. Lee

---

Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening.

-- Dorothy Sarnoff

---

I quote others only the better to express myself.

-- Michel de Montaigne

---

Trouble is a sieve through which we sift our acquaintances. Those too big to pass through are our friends.

-- Arlene Francis

---

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

-- Napoleon

---

Ask the next Question. Keep on asking questions, and don't stop; sooner or later you'll be asking intelligent ones. If you live long enough.

-- Theodore Sturgeon

---

Censorship removes the ability of people to experience what they wish. Anarchy removes the ability of people to avoid what they wish.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition aspired, and success achieved.

-- Helen Keller

---

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

-- Dale Carnegie

---

We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them.

-- Thucydides

---

If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt others.

-- the Dalai Lama

---

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

-- Gen. George S. Patton

---

Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.

-- Judy Garland

---

Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.

-- Shirley MacLaine

---

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.

-- W. Somerset Maughm

---

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

-- Mark Twain

---

Originality is the art of concealing your source.

-- unknown

---

Traditional human government consists of thieves and murderers. By adopting the electoral process, we have weeded out the murderers. This is actually about as good as it gets.

-- unknown

---

Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.

-- Michael Ventura

---

A man who was handsome, intelligent, and elegant, was asked who he was. "I am the Devil", he replied. "But that cannot be," said the questioner, "for the Devil is evil and ugly!" "My friend," was the reply, "you have been listening to my detractors."

-- Idries Shah

---

We cannot command nature except by obeying her.

-- Sir Francis Bacon

---

One man is no more than another if he does no more than another.

-- Miguel de Cervantes

---

It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.

-- Queen Christina of Sweden

---

It is better to wear chains than to believe you are free, and weigh yourself down with invisible chains.

-- unknown

---

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

-- Karl Marx

---

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

-- Christopher Morle

---

We are each only one drop in a great ocean -- but some of the drops sparkle!

-- net fortune cookie

---

The time is always right to do what is right.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

---

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the cruelest words.

-- Dr. Joyce Brothers

---

Only fools and dead men don't change their minds. Fools won't and dead men can't.

-- John H. Patterson

---

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

-- Robert Maynard Hutchins

---

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

-- Stanley Kubrick

---

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

-- Albert Einstein

---

Hope is a waking dream.

-- Aristotle

---

Pauca sed matura
(Few but excellent).

-- Gauss

---

The key to change... is to let go of fear.

-- Rosanne Cash

---

Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries.

-- Corita Kent

---

That friendship will not continue to the end which is begun for an end.

-- Francis Quareles

---

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope or confidence.

-- Helen Keller

---

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not care to be herself.

-- Anais Nin

---

Those who are mentally and emotionally healthy are those who have learned when to say yes, when to say no and when to say whoopee.

-- W.S. Krabill

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What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?

-- H.G. Wells

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Examine the contents, not the bottle.

-- The Talmud

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If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.

-- Jules Renard

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Any fool can make a rule.

-- Henry David Thoreau

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Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

-- Honore de Balzac

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Wise Man: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.

-- Elbert Hubbard

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The impossible is often the untried.

-- Jim Goodwin

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If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

-- James Michener

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Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

-- Mary Ellen Kelly

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Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

-- Eudora Welty

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A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.

-- Jean Paul Richter

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The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

-- Bertrand Russell

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Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

-- Anna Freud

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Love: something they say is blind; it's marriage which is the real eye opener.

-- anon.

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Love: an emotion which, even if unreturned, has its rainbow.

-- anon.

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Love: the only game that two can play and both win

-- anon.

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Love: the last and most serious of the childhood diseases.

-- anon.

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Love consists of happiness, given back and forth.

-- anon.

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Love: a situation which happens when you think almost as much of another as you do of yourself.

-- anon.

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Love: the only virtue that can be divided endlessly and still not be diminished.

-- anon.

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If you don't control your mind, someone else will.

-- John Allston

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Don't rent space to anyone in your head.

-- Anon.

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I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

-- Wilson Mizner

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You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.

-- Irish Proverb

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Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

-- Brendan Francis

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Anything I've ever done that ultimately was worthwhile... initially scared me to death.

-- Betty Bender

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If a man harbors any sort of fear, it ... makes him landlord to a ghost.

-- Lloyd Douglas

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Kill the snake of doubt in your soul, crush the worms of fear in your heart, and mountains will move out of your way.

-- Kate Seredy

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If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.

-- Mary Engelbreit

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Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

-- George Bernard Shaw

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You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.

-- Ruth E. Renkl

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Life is a battle in which we fall from wounds we receive in running away.

-- William L. Sullivan

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Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

-- Albert Einstein

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To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world ­- that I am able to change it in positive ways.

-- Maxine Hong Kingston

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Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.

-- Frank Tyger

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What we think, we become.

-- Buddha

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Sacher's Observation: Some people grow with responsibility -- others merely swell.

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Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.

-- Aldous Huxley

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Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.

-- Mahatma Ghandi

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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

-- Balzac

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When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.

-- Lillian Smith

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There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving -- by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

-- Aldous Huxley

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Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.

-- Ovid

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I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

-- Bill Cosby

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A mistake is evidence that someone tried to do something.

-- Anon.

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They can because they think they can.

-- Virgil

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Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.

-- Theodore N. Vail

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I tried to treat them like me, and some of them weren't.

-- Bill Russell (basketball coach, on his players)

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Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

-- Robert H. Jackson

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Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.

-- John Harold

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Acceptance of what happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.

-- William James

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Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.

-- Anon.

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Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized.

-- Francis R. Havergal

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Don't let other people tell you what you want.

-- Pat Riley

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We are what we believe we are.

-- Benjamin N. Cardozo

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Blessed are they that have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

-- James Russell Lowell

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Sharing what you have is more important than what you have.

-- Albert M. Wells, Jr.

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I don't believe in pessimism.

-- Clint Eastwood

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Virtue is its own punishment.

-- Denniston

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Righteous people terrify me... virtue is its own punishment.

-- Aneurin Bevan

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Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

-- Helen Keller

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If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right.

-- Mary Kay Ash

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You grow up the day you have your first real laugh ­- at yourself.

-- Ethel Barrymore

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You win the victory when you yield to friends.

-- Sophocles

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Happy people plan actions, they don't plan results.

-- Dennis Wholey

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All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them.

-- William F. Halsey

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When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

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Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.

-- Sydney Smith

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If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

-- Albert Schweitzer

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Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.

-- William Shakespeare, "The Rape of Lucrece"

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It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.

-- Oxford University Press, Edpress News

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I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

-- Louisa May Alcott

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Act ­- act in the living present!

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

-- Anon.

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Whatever you do, don't give up. Because all you can do once you've given up is bitch. I've known some great bitchers in my time. With some it's a passion, with others an art.

-- Molly Ivins

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The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.

-- Gail Sheehy

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The truth is more important than the facts.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright

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Ten persons who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

-- Napoleon I

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I want to do it because I want to do it.

-- Amelia Earhart

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In not making the decision, you've made one. Not doing something is the same as doing it.

-- Ivan Bloch

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To behave with dignity is nothing less than to allow others freely to be themselves.

-- Sol Chaneles

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Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

-- Henry Ford

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I am not a politician and my other habits are also good.

-- A. Ward

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I want to separate sin from crime. You may have to ask forgiveness for your sins from God, but not from the Minister of Justice. There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

-- Pierre Elliott Trudeau

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Come the Revolution things will be different. Not better, just different.

-- Ronald M. Novinson

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Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

-- Martin Luther King

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One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

-- Joseph Campbell

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Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.

-- Henry Adams, historian

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One may be in as just possession of truths as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

-- Sir Thomas Browne

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Strangers -- they're exciting, their mystery never ends
But there's nothing like looking at your own history
in the faces of your friends.

-- Ani DiFranco

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I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.

-- Voltaire

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Everything's in the mind. That's where it all starts. Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it.

-- Mae West

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Difficulties exist to be surmounted.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Luck is largely a matter of paying attention.

-- Susan M. Dodd

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Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.

-- Hugh Prather

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There's no labor a man can do that's undignified, if he does it right.

-- Bill Cosby

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No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.

-- Turkish proverb

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Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

-- Oscar Wilde

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I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.

-- Erica Jong

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When thinking won't cure fear, action will.

-- W. Clement Stone

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You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.

-- Oliver Goldsmith

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Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

-- Goethe

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I'm not happy. I'm cheerful. There's a difference. A happy woman has no cares at all. A cheerful woman has cares but has learned how to deal with them.

-- Beverly Sills

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Use what talents you have; the woods would have little music if no birds sang their song except those who sang best.

-- Reverend Oliver G. Wilson

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Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.

-- Josef Stalin [note! This may be misquoted]

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As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.

-- Zachary Scott

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Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as true strength.

-- Ralph Sockman

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We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

-- Max DuPree

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To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it, life will be valueless.

-- Marsha Sinetar

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Fear nothing, for every renewed effort raises all former failures into lessons, all sins into experiences.

-- Katherine Tingley

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He was the spirit of wit
and had such an art in guilding his failures,
that it was hard not to love his faults.

-- Nathaniel Lee, "The Princess of Cleaves," elegizing Rochester

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If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.

-- John Galsworthy

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When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

-- Edmund Burke

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Actually, marriage and crucifixion have a lot in common.

-- Anon.

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Marley was a Rasta; Moses was a Jew;
Jesus was an outlaw, just like me & you.
Let love be our religion; until this life is through,
The next best thing to heaven is a sinful life with you.

-- T3

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You will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life you did not enjoy while on earth.

-- the Torah

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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

-- Richard P. Feynman

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Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well preserved piece, but to skid broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out and defiantly shouting "Geronimo!"

-- Anonymous

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Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

-- Albert Einstein

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You can't expect a boy to be v