Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Say not, the struggle naught availeth,The labor and the wounds are vain,The enemy faints not, nor faileth,And as things have been, they remain.If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars;It may be, in yon smoke concealedYour comrades chase e'en now the fliersAnd, but for you, possess the field.For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,Seem here no painful inch to gain,Far back, through creeks and inlets making,Comes silent, flooding in, the main.And not by eastern windows only,When daylight comes, comes in the light;In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,But westward, look, the land is bright.

Arthur H. Clough, The Land is Br

I've got a new invention. It's a revolving bowl for tired goldfish.

Lefty Gomez

I never told my religion nor scrutinize that of another. I never attempted to make a convert nor wished to change another's creed. I have judged of others' religion by their lives...

Thomas Jefferson

They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty - even for a moment - it is enough.

Jeanette Winterson

Hard pounding, gentlemen: but we shall see who can pound the longest.

Duke of Wellington Arthur Welles

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in a manner in which they look forward to the trip

Winston Churchill

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

Thomas Carlyle

I have married thriteen couples. I'm about to do a marriage next month.

Sally Kirkland

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Bertrand Russell

According to other writers, it is the women who last longest in sieges, the young men who soonest fall into that deadly lethargy that precedes actual death. But the account is accurate enough: that is what a siege is like. Moreover, that is what it is meant to be like. When a city is encircled and deprived of food, it is not the expectation of the attackers that the garrison will hold out until individual soldiers... drop dead in the streets. The death of ordinary inhabitants of the city is expected to force the hand of the civilian or military leadership. The goal is surrender; the means is not the defeat of the enemy army, but the fearful spectacle of the civilian dead.

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust