The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.

Russia has abolished God, but so far God has been tolerant.

John Swayze

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.

Charles Dickens

I have a political attitude, but I'm certainly not a politician.

Kgalema Motlanthe

The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is the exact truth.

George Eliot

I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race,... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.

Paul Goodman

People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

John Hodgman

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Thomas Traherne

When I do good, I feel good when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

Abraham Lincoln

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

William James

Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for

Oliver James