You cannot find the centre Where we dance, where we play, Where life is still asleep Under the closed flower, Under the smooth shell Of eggs in the cupped nest That mock the faded blue Of your remoter heaven.

The path from dreams to success does exist. May you have the vision to find it, the courage to get on to it, and the perseverance to follow it.

Kalpana Chawla

If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; And the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers; And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering ... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Thomas Jefferson

I really wanted to just be a musician. I didn't want to be anything else, but I was funny and all that.

Jamie Foxx

Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 3.

I don't know who the hell Paul Lynde is, or why he's funny, and I prefer it to be a mystery to me.

Paul Lynde

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

John W. Gardner

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me workI am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at GettysburgAnd pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:What place is this?Where are we now?I am the grass. Let me work.

Carl Sandburg

Women's liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one is likely to do anything about that.

Golda Meir

Every time a child says, I don't believe in fairies, there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

James Barrie

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Thomas Hobbes

I would have been glad to have lived under my wood side, and to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken this government.

Oliver Cromwell

We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

Yvette Clarke