Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Business, that's easily defined; it's other people's money.

Alexander Dumas

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.

Mary Oliver

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Wallace Stevens

I actually got hurt in a steel factory in 1985 and so that changed my life. I went to a junior college and that's where I discovered acting.

John Corbett

I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

Rudyard Kipling

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Henry David Thoreau

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

William Faulkner

I think the cost of energy will come down when we make this transition to renewable energy.

Al Gore

In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people. And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.

Walter Lippmann

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

George Orwell

Indolence is sweet, and its consequence bitter.

Voltaire

When a nation which has long groaned under the intolerable yoke of a tyrant rises at last and throws off its chains, do you call that weakness? The man who, to rescue his house from the flames, finds his physical strength redoubled, so that he lifts burdens with ease which in the absence of excitement he could scarcely move; he who under the rage of an insult attacks and puts to flight half a score of his enemies, are such persons to be called weak? My good friend, if resistance be strength, how can the highest degree of resistance be a weakness?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe