If the generous ideas of youth are too often over- clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false

Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

One should always think of what one is about: when one is learning, one should not think of play: and when one is at play, one should not think of one's learning.

Lord Chesterfield

A dream doesn't become reality through magic it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

Colin Powell

If youth knew if age could.

Sigmund Freud

The long run is what puts the tiger in the cat.

Bill Squires

When I'm having a bad day, I pick up my guitar.

Michelle Branch

I still have a belief and a faith that some great things are still going to happen in my career. If I didn't believe that, it makes no sense for me to be out there, and on top of that, I know this is a period of time that God wants me to persevere through.

Michael Chang

Isn't one of your first exercises in learning how to communicate to write a description of how to tie your shoelaces? The point being that it's basically impossible to use text to show that.

Donald Norman

Thoughts is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

Bertrand Russell

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom' one of Yvonne's stock phrases makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

Christopher Hitchens

The problems that the world faces - from nuclear proliferation to climate change - can't be tackled by the West alone. They need a coalition of not just West and East, but they need a coalition of Christian and Jew and Muslim.

David Miliband