In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal.

Reason is our soul's left hand, faith her right, by these we reach divinity.

John Donne

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Samuel Johnson

Your work is a separate thing from you. You are this person who has your friends and your life, and you have to see the separation. If you see the separation between your work and yourself it's so much easier.

Julie Brown

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.

Dan Savage

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Mahatma Gandhi

Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn't me.

Elizabeth Gaskell

It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well.

Cameron Crowe

The world is ruled by butterflies adding to their weapon piles. Imagine what your taxes buy. We hardly ever try.

Gordon Sumner

One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.

Ernest Hemingway

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. - from Live Without Principle

Henry David Thoreau

You can't cheat kids. If you cheat them when they're children they'll make you pay when they're sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that's finally when they're old enough to stand up to you and say, 'What a hypocrite you've been all this time. You've never given me what I really wanted, which is you'.

John Lennon

Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.

Marian Keyes