My dad and grandpa were in the army and as a country singer you're constantly playing at military bases all across the country and meeting soldiers and their families and hearing their stories.

The message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection.

Alexander Maclaren

War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the sheltered life. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.

Sir Edmund Gosse

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

H.G. Wells

The superior man understands what is right the inferior man understands what will sell.

Confucius

In their heyday, the Pet Shop Boys were the Interpol of the Eighties, dressing up to sing really weird pop songs about lust and loneliness in the big city. They're low-pro now, not retro-worshipped in the manner of Depeche Mode, New Order, or The Cure, but you can hear the reason why - these guys are too sad.

Rob Sheffield

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Ayn Rand

Fairness means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make it happen yourself.

Rick Riordan

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

Rudyard Kipling

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

Terry Pratchett

When you express gratitude for the blessings that come into your life, it not only encourages the universe to send you more, it also sees to it that those blessings remain.

Stephen Richards

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

Henry David Thoreau

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Marcel Proust