In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

Richard Yates

It comes with faith, for with complete faith there is no fear of what faces you in life or death.

Jacqueline Cochran

One of the most important virtues in social life, a virtue that is becoming less common by the day, is discretion.

Adolf Freiherr Knigge

What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute. There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something. Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance. You could not liberate a stone if there were no law of gravity -- for where will the stone go, once it is quarried?

Antoine De SaintExupery

The ten most dangerous words in the English language are Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

Ronald Reagan

I do not like sports, unless you consider treating all humankind with love and respect a sport.

Todd Barry

All movements go too far, and this is certainly true of the movement toward subjectivity, which began with Luther and Descartes as an assertion of the individual and has culminated by an inherent logic in his complete subjection. The subjectivity of truth is a hasty doctrine not validly deducible from the premises which have been thought to imply it; and the habits of centuries have made many things seem dependent upon the theological belief which in fact are not so. Men lived with one kind of illusion, and when they lost it they fell into another. But it is not by old error that new error can be combated. Detachment and objectivity, both in thought and in feeling, have been historically but not logically associated with certain traditional beliefs; to preserve them without these beliefs is both possible and important. A certain degree of isolation both in space and time is essential to generate the independence required for the most important work; there must be something which is felt to be of more importance than the admiration of the contemporary crowd. We are suffering not from the decay of theological beliefs but from the loss of solitude.

Bertrand Russell, On Being Moder

The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

Irving Babbitt

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Samuel Johnson

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

Lewis H. Lapham

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer