Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are.

So his life has flowed From its mysterious urn a sacred stream, In whose calm depth the beautiful and pure Alone are mirrored; which, though shapes of ill May hover round its surface, glides in light, And takes no shadow from them.

Thomas Noon Talfourd

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Malcolm Forbes

An apology given just to appease one's conscience is self-serving and better left unspoken!

Evinda Lepins

I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

Jodi Picoult

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Thomas Carlyle

Sometimes in football you have to score goals.

Thierry Henry

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

H. L. Mencken

I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past.

Woodrow Wilson

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

Henry David Thoreau

Judges are the weakest link in our system of justice, and they are also the most protected.

Alan Dershowitz

Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.

Gregory Bateson

Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.

Greil Marcus