We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Benjamin Disraeli

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.

Colin Powell

Freedom is contagious. That's why despots fear it so much.

Bill Owens

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

George Bernard Shaw

Many women, particularly young women, have claimed the right to use the most explicit sex terms, including extremely vulgar ones, in public as well as private. But it is men, far more than women, who have been liberated by this change. For now that women use these terms, men no longer need to watch their own language in the presence of women. But is this a gain for women?

Margaret Mead

The Assembly has witnessed over the last weeks how historical truth is established once an allegation has been repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

Dag Hammarskjold

Leaders create an environment which everyone has the opportunity to do work which matches his potential capability and for which an equitable differential reward is provided.

Elliott Jaques

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Philip Levine

Education is not so important as people think.

Elizabeth Bowen

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

When you are down and out something always turns up -- and it is usually the noses of your friends.

Orson Welles

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

Thomas Nagel