It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.

Christopher Hitchens

The emphasis on the birth of Christ tends to polarize our pluralistic society and create legal and ethnic belligerence.

John Clayton

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness it teaches industry and thrift above all it teaches entire trust.

Gertrude Jekyll

Every life is precious.

Rick Perry

It used to be that you'd have a song recorded by a major country artist and if it was a hit, you could buy a car. Now you can buy a dealership.

Tom T. Hall

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

Thomas Jefferson

Für Sabina bedeutet Leben Sehen. Das Sehen wird durch zwei Pole begrenzt: das grelle, blendende Licht und das absolute Dunkel. [] Extreme markieren Grenzen, hinter denen das Leben zu ende geht, und die Leidenschaft für Extreme, in der Kunst wie in der Politik, ist eine verschleierte Todessehnsucht.

Milan Kundera

When you are right, everything around you is right, for the beautiful flow that is inside your heart has the capacity to spread its fragrance of oneness-light all around you.

Sri Chinmoy

It is a waste of money to help those who show no desire to help themselves.

Taylor Caldwell

If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.

Paulo Coelho

The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle

Abraham Lincoln

The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not?

E.A. Bucchianeri