Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Joan Didion

Even when I'm in quite a happy state of mind, I like writing really sad songs. I think a lot of people do.

Ellie Goulding

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

Adam Smith

A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Grace Murray Hopper

An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

Salvatore Quasimodo

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Natalie Clifford Barney

What makes night within us may leave stars.

Victor Hugo

The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

Marianne Williamson

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

Stephen Vincent Benet

I paid the price for that, but it was worth it, to speak the truth. The Zionists have to understand that's their country, too. Palestinians were there long before any European Zionists.

Helen Thomas

That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.

Mahatma Gandhi

To teach successfully we must tell all we know, but only what is adaptable to the student.

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