The essence of all immorality and sin is making ourselves the center around which we subordinate all interest.

But my experience is that people who have been through painful, difficult times are filled with compassion.

Amy Grant

Her life was like a burst of wild, flowing Chinese calligraphy, written under the influence of alcohol.

Weihui Zhou

Ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart.

Frank Luntz

...music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.

Oscar Wilde, Intentions

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Samuel Butler

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Adrienne Rich

Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

Margaret Thatcher

A heart that loves is always young.

Proverb

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

A. E. van Vogt

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Robert Bresson

Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.

Rick Santorum