I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

What we have inherited from our fathers and mothers is not all that 'walks in us.' There are all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs. They have no tangibility, but they haunt us all the same and we can not get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. Ghosts must be all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea.

Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts

What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?

Terry Pratchett

I was thinking that when I have children, that I should always dress as a character for them, so they think their mom is Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella. It would be totally messed up!

Gwen Stefani

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see farther.

John Pierpont Morgan

Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.

Mahatma Gandhi

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails -- aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

Henry David Thoreau

I become more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of Hussein, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers and his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.

Mahatma Gandhi

The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

A. R. Ammons

I haven't eaten at a McDonald's since I became President.

William J. Clinton

Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.

Richard Bach