He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

No one ever tells us the truth, even those we love.

Anna Held

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

Marcel Proust

The strength that we want is not a brute, unregulated strength; the beauty that we want is no mere surface beauty; but we want a beauty on the surface of life that is from the central force of principle within, as the beauty on the cheek of health is from the central force at the heart.

Mark Hopkins

We learn from failure much more than from success; we often discover what we will do by finding our what we will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Samuel Smiles

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

Virginia Woolf

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

Edvard Munch

Government is dysfunctional.

Michael Bloomberg

So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

When you're feeling terrific, notify your face.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Robert Southey

Nothing hurts a new truth more than an old error

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors the living could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you your life?

Christopher Hitchens