I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

Leo Tolstoy

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

Oscar Wilde

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain

William Shakespeare

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essa

It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.

Jodi Picoult

On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

Oscar Wilde

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.

Washington Irving

Skip the religion and politics, head straight to the compassion. Everything else is a distraction.

Talib Kweli

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause; Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned!

Henry Timrod

You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.

Meryl Streep

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

Alfred North Whitehead

I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and, minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a white streak behind him flowered out into the delicate wavering muslin of a parachute -- a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments.

Charles A. Lindbergh