I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.

Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things, if we could know which ones they are.

Mark Twain

The President regards the Japanese as a brave people but courage, though useful in time of war, is subordinate to knowledge of arts hence, courage without such knowledge is not to be highly esteemed.

Townsend Harris

Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.

Maria Weston Chapman

We discovered that peace at any price is no peace at all...that life at any price has no value whatever; that life is nothing without the privileges, the prides, the rights, the joys that make it worth living and also worth giving...and that there is something more hideous, more atrocious than war or than death; and that is to live in fear.

Eve Curie Labouisse

My wife is the kind of girl who will not go anywhere without her mother, and her mother will go anywhere.

John Barrymore

The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence

Aristotle

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

Tom Wolfe

What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilization concerns man's behavior to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.

Dr Edward Mayhew

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

Robert Frost

No man can fight his way to the top and stay at the top without exercising the fullest measure of grit, courage, determination, resolution. Every man who gets anywhere does so because he has first firmly resolved to progress in the world and then has enough stick-to-it-tiveness to transform his resolution into reality. Without resolution, no man can win any worthwhile place among his fellow men.

B. C. Forbes

I don't do what I'm doing to fight terror. ... I do it because I care about kids. Fighting terror is maybe seventh or eighth on my list of priorities. But working over there, I've learned a few things. I've learned that terror doesn't happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.

Greg Mortenson