When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone.

You may be to call up the entire encyclopedia, but a brain with no heart and no reasoning .. well, nothing is more meaningless.

Melissa de la Cruz

I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.

Edna Ferber

Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.

B. R. Ambedkar

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

David Foster Wallace

Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Henry David Thoreau

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

George Will

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

George Bernard Shaw

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)

Christopher Hitchens

It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.

Fred Woodworth

You can will an act of service but you cannot will love.

Anthony de Mello

I don't compromise my principles for politics.

Chris Christie

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

Henry David Thoreau