The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth.

Leo Tolstoy

Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.

J. M. Synge

Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value.

Jean Cocteau

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

Mahatma Gandhi

And be on they guard against the good and the just They would fain curcify those who devise their own virtue they hate the lonesome ones.

Friedrich Nietzsche

To my knowledge, I was the first guy really to do what I do. And then later on different comedians started trying doing it.

Don Rickles

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.

William James

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.

Thomas B. Macaulay

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

Robert Collier

Conscience -- the only incorruptible thing about us.

Henry Fielding

Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

Philip Roth