Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the co-operation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.

When I started my last business, I didn't receive a paycheck for 13 months. The average person can't handle that pressure.

Robert Kiyosaki

Man, an animal that makes bargains.

Adam Smith

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

Neil Gaiman

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, He will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.What Heine expresses as a kind of joke is, according to Freud, a deep psychological truth: along with the innate human drive for pleasure there is also an equally innate drive to inflict pain upon others. This impulse estranges people from one another and renders them decidedly antisocial.~ Lee Hardy, The Fabric of this World

Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Ein

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows. That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen, patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused.

C.S. Lewis

I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.

Dax Shepard

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Edward Hopper

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Mark Twain

With disadvantages enough to bring him to humility, a Scotsman is one of the proudest things alive.

Oliver Goldsmith

The United States brags about its political system, but the President says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves.

Deng Xiaoping

People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain't so.

Jim Butcher

How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.

Madame Swetchine