It is easy to judge evil unmixed, replied Gwydion. But, alas, in most of us good and bad are closely woven as the threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging.

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Ezra Pound

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Victoria Secunda

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.

Brooks Atkinson

Happiness must preclude false indulgence and physic.

Jane Austen

American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Michael Mandelbaum

What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

Marcel Proust

We believe that the government has an important role to create the conditions that promote entrepreneurship, upward mobility, and individual responsibility.

Paul Ryan

We live, I think, in the century of science and, perhaps, even in the century of physics.

Polykarp Kusch

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

Eric Hoffer

It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.

Karl Kraus