Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
With all due respect to Speaker Hastert, trying to eliminate the IRS by adopting a national retail sales tax is a very dumb idea.
I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.
Again and again, when Westerners are perceived as denigrating Muhammad, the Koran, or Islam, Islamists demonstrate, riot or kill.
There are 5,000 great people for every jerk on Usenet. But that still is a lot of jerks. Proceed with caution and eyes wide open.
The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
For me, it's church and state, not church in state, and I really feel there are some churches in central Ohio crossing that line.
Ambition is not in itself an evil; nor is he to be condemned whose spirit prompts him to seek fame by worthy and honourable ways.
Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior.
I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.
Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.
The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
The only hope lies in the fact that the American people - like people everywhere - are basically decent people with common sense.
Keep score, which is what the Talmud recognizes as a distinction between work and play that renders a game unfit for the Sabbath.
No law can possibly meet the convenience of every one: we must be satisfied if it be beneficial on the whole and to the majority.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot.
Russia is not going to give up easily on Syria. They've had a relationship with that country since 1955. It's very close to them.
It was very interesting growing up in South Africa then. It was extraordinary. It was multiculturalism before it became an issue.
Power is more safely retained by cautious than by severe councils. [Lat., Potentiam cautis quam acribus consiliis tutius haberi.]
It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions.
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
We have had raucous moments in our history. And I think we're in one now. But it's not going to endanger the future of democracy.
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government...is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows.
To get the inestimable good that freedom of the press assures one must know how to submit to the inevitable evil it gives rise to.
[R]eligion cannot share the material strength of the rulers without being burdened with some of the animosity roused against them.
A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.
For me, education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.
Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.
Since the primitive times, the wealth of the popes was exposed to envy, their powers to opposition, and their persons to violence.
But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.
Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.
Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.
Bringing democratic control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to force the issue onto the public agenda.
And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.
Im sick and tired of old men sitting around in air conditioned rooms here in Washington, dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
An extraordinary set of reminiscences, beautifully put together by an extremely sensitive, even gifted interviewer. It is a jewel.
There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.
Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us.
How beautifully everything is arranged by Nature; as soon as a child enters the world, it finds a mother ready to take care of it.
If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.
The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.
Nothing is of greater importance in time of war than in knowing how to make the best use of a fair opportunity when it is offered.
The innovator has for enemies all who have done well under the old, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.
The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used to be.
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.