The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

C.S. Lewis

A source of bad conscience, however, is the knowledge that my way of life, austere though it may appear to the richer folk, is still ruinously exploitive of nature -- not in my backyard, where I practice harmlessness toward even the wasps, but in the atmosphere, where my fossil fuel combustion's carbon dioxide is helping change the climate; in all those mountainous places where the metals and minerals that structure and drive my American life are torn from the earth; and in the flesh of fish and birds, mammals, and reptiles, where the chemicals that made the paper and plastic I use bioaccumulate, deforming reproduction. That guilty knowledge is another argument for material simplicity. The less I consume, the less harm I do to that which I love. In a consumer society, harmless living may be simple, but it is not easy. I make no claim to exemplary harmlessness or simplicity.

Stephanie Mills, Epicurean Simpl

The first duty to children is to make them happy, If you have not made them so, you have wronged them, No other good they may get can make up for that.

Charles Buxton

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself; it never cheapens or debases him who reaches for it but ennobles and honors him.

Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.

Ethel Waters

The conception that, instead of this, contemporary society is at or near a turning point is very prominent in the views of a school of social scientists who, though they are still comparatively few, are getting more and more of a hearing.

Talcott Parsons

These will vary in every human being but knowledge is the same for every mind, and every mind may and ought to be trained to receive it.

Frances Wright

Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.

Caroline Kennedy

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Andrea Dworkin

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Iris Murdoch

Every whore needs a man that could turn her into a beautiful swan...

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