From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been ;abandoned.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Lewis Mumford

Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

Jim Woodring

Religion is just mind control.

George Carlin

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn

Bertrand Russell

I'm going to be on the road for the rest of my life.

Woody Herman

The Lord is my shepherdI shall not want him for longHe maketh me to lie down in green pasturesand there are no green pasturesHe leadeth me beside still watersand still waters run deep

Ernest Hemingway

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

George Bernard Shaw

If I be the first of us to die,Let grief not blacken long your sky.Be bold yet modest in your grieving.There is a change but not a leaving.For just as death is part of life,The dead live on forever in the living.And all the gathered riches of our journey,The moments shared, the mysteries explored,The steady layering of intimacy stored,The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,The wordless language of look and touch,The knowing,Each giving and each taking,These are not flowers that fade,Nor trees that fall and crumble,Nor are they stone,For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstandAnd mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.What we were, we are.What we had, we have.A conjoined past imperishably present.So when you walk the wood where once we walkedtogetherAnd scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,Be still.Close your eyes.Breathe.Listen for my footfall in your heart.I am not gone but merely walk within you.

Nicholas Evans, from The Smoke J

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.

Henry Ward Beecher

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users.

Patricia Hewitt

It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities that she has, and not by the qualities she may not have.

Charles Dickens