Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul.

It is a matter of shame that in the morning the birds should be awake earlier than you.

Abu Bakr

The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.

Josh Billings

Don't waste your energy trying to change opinions ... Do your thing, and don't care if they like it.

Tina Fey

When people generally are aware of a problem, it can be said to have entered the public consciousness. When people get on their hind legs and holler, the problem has not only entered the public consciousness -- it has also become a part of the public conscience. At that point, things in our democracy begin to hum.

Hubert Humphrey

Good and bad men are less than they seem.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance and without any visible reason.

Lord Chesterfield

This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.

Vaclav Havel

Power is not a means; it is an end....Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself....The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy - everything.... No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends....We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.... There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless....If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

George Orwell, 1984

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Jean Baudrillard

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

Pete Townshend

I have long considered it one of God's greatest mercies that the future is hidden from us. If it were not, life would surely be unbearable.

Eugene Forsey

When I think about the songs I might record, I ask myself, 'Can I picture anybody I know back home sitting in their truck cranking this up?'

Blake Shelton