Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.
W. H. Auden
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.
As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.
Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.
Christopher Hitchens
My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor
Thomas Carlyle
Fate is not in man but around him
Albert Camus
Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage -- it can be delightful.
George Bernard Shaw
I have no fear of war, said Arthur Stuart. That's when kings get to show their mettle. You're thinking of chess, said Margaret. In war, everyone has their chance to bleed.
Orson Scott Card
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater.
Albert Einstein
People generally despise where they flatter
Aristotle
Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vurnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.
Stephen King
All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.
Ernest Hemingway
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Any big hotels have got scandals,' he said. 'Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go.
If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.
Paulo Coelho
What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?
Neil Gaiman
If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.
Samuel Johnson
Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians.
H. G. Bohn
Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.
Kurt Vonnegut
Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance.
Boldness is business is the first, second, and third thing.
However big the fool, there is always a bigger fool to admire him.
Nicholas Boileau
Greatest fools are the most often satisfied.
A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
If your descent is from heroic sires, show in your life a remnant of their fires.
Lies and secrets, Tessa, they are like a cancer in the soul. They eat away what is good and leave only destruction behind.
Cassandra Clare
Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.
He who has not looked on Sorrow will never see Joy.
Kahlil Gibran
Attach yourself to those who advise you rather than praise you.
Praising an honest person who doesn't deserve it, always wounds them.
Some excel in rhyme who reason foolishly.
The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.
No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.
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