Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

The effort to remold, in one's own life, the culture one has grown into is heavy with danger. The searcher is likely to be treated as a criminal or a madman, condemned and criticized by his own society, ridiculed, even persecuted. Even if he is more fortunate--even if he is simply ignored by others--he must begin his struggle as a cripple. For to consciously reject the generalized attitudes' of the parent society is to reject positive reference points that have helped him evaluate his actions and accomplishments.This is the price of freedom on the peripheries. We are able to free ourselves from our parent culture only by destroying parts of ourselves, much as an animal might escape the hunter's trap by gnawing off its own leg. But unlike the wounded animal, the detached person is doubly crippled; however he mutilates himself, he will never quite be free of the trap but will carry it with him in his new freedom.

Donald A. Hansen, An Invitation

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

Emma Goldman

We have a president who stole the presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities.

Barbra Streisand

Discretion is being able to raise your eyebrow instead of your voice.

Anon.

If you think you have trouble supporting a wife, try not supporting her.

Source Unknown

It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.

Aesop, The Jay and the Peacock F

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

Marcel Proust

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Simone Weil

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.

Plato

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.

James Whistler

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

George Santayana