Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

Christopher Hitchens

Since we live in this world, we have to do our best for this world.

Aung San Suu Kyi

The reality of life is that your perceptions -- right or wrong -- influence everything else you do. When you get a proper perspective of your perceptions, you may be surprised how many other things fall into place.

Roger Birkman

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks ... It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.

Samuel Adams

The ugliest thing in the world is a beautiful woman without the brains or courage to know that [beauty] is nothing more than an accident.

Charlie Fletcher

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Journeys end in lovers meeting, Every wise man's son doth know.

William Shakespeare

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Plato

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate wit

Thomas Jefferson

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Susan Sontag

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution... even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.

Marquis de Sade

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

Samuel Johnson