History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes [Letter to von Humboldt, 1813].

I love Daredevil. I thought it was enjoyable. Okay? There were critical issues with it, and that's why I wear black, some people wear red - we are entitled to our opinions.

Avi Arad

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monumentos of man's pride.

William James

Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.

Konstantin Stanislavisky

We might make a public moan in the newspapers about the decay of conscience, but in private conversation, no matter what crimes a man may have committed or how cynically he may have debased his talent or his friends, variations on the answer Yes, but I did it for the money, satisfy all but the most tiresome objections.

Lewis H. Lapham

Ordinary people who know nothing of phonetics or elocution have difficulties in understanding slow speech composed of perfect sounds, while they have no difficulty in comprehending an imperfect gabble if only the accent and rhythm are natural.

Alexander Graham Bell, The Mecha

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake we shouldn't keep him there.

Ernest Hemingway

As she came up to the arch Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone.She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillas identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them.'Who are these, these ...?; She gestured with her hand.''These?' The man with the brush sounded surprised. 'The lost.''Men who died in battle?''No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in cemetries.''These are just the ... unfound?'She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes.When she could speak again, she said, 'from the whole war?'The man shook his head. 'Just these fields.' He gestured with his arm.Elizabeth went and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight.'Nobody told me.' She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. 'My God, nobody told me.

Sebastian Faulks, 'Birdsong' p.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising.

E. W. Howe

People are changed, not by coercion or intimidation, but by example.

Source Unknown

You do not reform a world by ignoring it.

George Bush