A faith in culture is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. Culture as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a platform, is unendurable. For none of the activities in question cares a straw for that faith or cause. It is like a return to early Semitic religion where names themselves were regarded as powers.

Nothing is ever certain.

Alice Sebold

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

Albert Camus

I'm tied of hearing about temperance instead of abstinence, in order to please the cocktail crowd in church congregations.

Vance Havner

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

Theodore Roosevelt

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

Marian Wright Edelman

Peter Ustinov was the first really positive influence in my career. He was real and he bore witness to it. The things he said to you, he lived them.

Terence Stamp

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Desiderius Erasmus

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

Jodi Picoult

Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.

Paul Tillich

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.

Steven Biko

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

James Russell Lowell

One of the first and most difficult steps in a science is to conceive clearly the nature of the magnitudes about which we are arguing.

William Stanley Jevons