You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence.

I don't think anyone has a normal family.

Edward Furlong

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

Russell Banks

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Arnold J. Toynbee

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few went to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

Henry David Thoreau

Anyone who doesn't miss the past never had a mother.

Gregory Nunn

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

Harold Rosenberg

Everybody thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.

Leo Tolstoy

Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.

Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Willia

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Thomas Carlyle

We lift ourselves by our thought. We climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always everywhere.

Orison Swett Marden

I am very sorry, but I cannot learn languages. I have tried hard, only to find that men of ordinary capacity can learn Sanskrit in less time that it takes me to buy a German Dictionary

George Bernard Shaw

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

Thomas Alva Edison