The communitarians may say you've been enjoying too much individual freedom, and that you must give up some of that for the benefit of the community. But they really mean that they want more power over your life - to force you to subsidize, obey and conform to their choices.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

June Jordan

If there is any delay in that feedback loop between thinking of something and seeing it and building on it, then there is this whole world of ideas which will never be.

Bret Victor

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.

Jane Austen

The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.

C.S. Lewis

Everybody's funny in different ways.

Colin Quinn

Merit is much more cheaply acknowledged than rewarded

Samuel Johnson

There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.

Terry Pratchett

Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.

Ambrose Bierce

When you're dying of thirst it's too late to think about digging a well.

Japanese Proverb

Tell the truth or trump - but get the trick

Mark Twain

I'm very happy being me, although sometimes I'd love to be a bird so that I could fly.

Joy Fielding

There can be no high civility without a deep morality

Ralph Waldo Emerson