I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

Christopher Hitchens

You can't choose up sides on a round world.

Wayne Dyer

Many shed tears merely for show, and have dry eyes when no one's around to observe them.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

Niklas Zennstrom

That best portion of a good man's life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

William Wordsworth

In the corrupted currents of this word offence's gilded hand may solve by justice, and oft, tis seen the wicked prize itself buys out the law: but 'tis not so above; There is no shuffling, there the action lies in his true nature; And we ourselves

William Shakespeare

I do consider myself part of black history.

Mary J. Blige

A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else.

Len Wein

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

Henry Miller

But how can he expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

William Wordsworth

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

Karl R. Popper

You can't set a hen in one morning and have chicken salad for lunch.

George M. Humphrey