My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

John Berger

Research serves to make building stones out of stumbling blocks.

Arthur D. Little

Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.

Jane Austen

The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.

Reinhold Niebuhr

You live with your thoughts -- so be careful what they are.

Eva Arrington

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

Anna Akhmatova

They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.

William Hazlitt

On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.

Terry Pratchett

When I am dead, I hope it is said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read'.

Hilaire Belloc

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

Alan Greenspan

How pleasant it was in the garden! And how delightful other people's emotions were! -- much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends -- those were the fascinating things in life. He pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had be gone to his aunt's, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that!

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dori