The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.

Royal Little

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.

Joni Mitchell

I think every girl needs to love herself, regardless of anything. Like if you're having a bad day, if you don't like your hair, if you don't have the best family situation, whatever, you have to love yourself and you can't do anything until you love yourself first.

Julianne Hough

Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living beings in that enormous immensity.

Wernher Von Braun

Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

C.S. Lewis

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.

Jodi Picoult

I therefore declare, that if you wish any remission of the taxation which falls upon the homes of the people of England and Wales, you can only find it by reducing the great military establishments, and diminishing the money paid to fighting men in time of peace.

Richard Cobden

Shiva... is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan;The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things.Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme,Empty darkness under the death-tent wings.She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch a new brood,Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed.

Robinson Jeffers

When I was at school, I was in choirs more than anything else, from a very young age, about 9 years old. And then I started taking drum lessons.

Ben Barnes

Sometimes you have to be selfish to be selfless.

Edward Albert

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

Max Planck

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson