But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Jeanette Winterson

'Metals' has partly been about me regaining my self respect and I feel like I'm growing the muscles I want to grow again.

Feist

Nothing was or is farther from my intentions, than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed doubt.

Thomas Jefferson

I can't live without my beauty products. I love to be in my bathroom with my candles lit, morning, noon and night. I like taking hot baths and hot showers, using my body scrubs and lotions.

Traci Bingham

There are those who travel and those who are going somewhere. They are different and yet they are the same. The success has this over his rivals: He knows where he is going.

Mark Caine

All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.

Thomas Carlyle

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

Christopher Hitchens

I always felt different as a kid, and the Kinks were like, 'Yeah, we're the Kinks.' Celebrate your difference don't be afraid of your sense of humor, or your personality, or who you are. It emboldened me.

Michael Weatherly

Many people in the world today are not starving because there is an inherent inability to produce food, they are starving because they are caught in the middle of political fights and blockades that have been used as weapons.

Ralph Merkle

I'm going to take care of the man I'm with. I grew up in a household where my mum takes care of my dad - she cooks, she does everything - and that's the kind of girl I am.

Nicole Scherzinger

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth