Failure is not the worst thing in the world -- the very worst is not to try

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Spencer Tracy

You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me.

Orson Scott Card

Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains, they drown in every drop.

Charles de Gaulle

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

Russell Baker

There are people, also, who cannot believe that beauty and gaiety are a part of goodness. When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

Edith Sitwell

Beware the hobby that eats.

Benjamin Franklin

'Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

Naomi Wolf

Dance like there's nobody watching Love like you'll never get hurtSing like there's nobody listeningLive like it's heaven on earthAnd speak from the heart to be heard.Purkey is the source of this quotation that is attributed to many others: it was made popular in the song Come From The Heart written by Susannah Clark and Richard Leigh. Purkey closed his speeches with this poem and it has now made it into the public domain.

William W. Purkey

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Fellowship with God means warfare with the world.

Charles E. Fuller

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors the living could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you your life?

Christopher Hitchens

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

H. L. Mencken