Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can reach. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries and predecessors; try to be better than yourself.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible

George Orwell

A plural Legislature is as necessary to good Government as a single Executive. It is not enough that your Legislature should be numerous; it should also be divided. Numbers alone are not a sufficient Barrier against the Impulses of Passion, the Combinations of Interest, the Intrigues of Faction, the Haste of Folly, or the Spirit of Encroachment. One Division should watch over and controul the other, supply its Wants, correct its Blunders, and cross its Designs, should they be criminal or erroneous. Wisdom is the specific Quality of the Legislature, grows out of the Number of the Body, and is made up of the Portions of Sense and Knowledge which each Member brings to it.

Benjamin Franklin

Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.

Jack Kerouac

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

Jorge Luis Borges

Everyone suffers wrongs for which there is no remedy.

Edward W. Howe

They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.

William Cowper

I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.

Albert Einstein

When in doubt, don't.

Saul W. Gellerman

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.

Cyril Connolly

Money often costs too much.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

...although both the Academics and the Pyrrhonian Skeptics say that they believe some things, yet here too the difference between the two philosophies is quite plain. For the word believe has different meanings; it means not to resist but simply to follow without any strong impulse or inclination, as the boy is said to believe his tutor; but sometimes it means to assent to a thing of deliberate choice and with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire, as when the incontinent man believes him who approves of an extravagant mode of life. Since, therefore, Carneades and Cleitomachus declare that a strong inclination accompanies their credence

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Py

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

George Saunders