Hogwarts is threatened! shouted Professor McGonagall. Man the boundaries, protect us, do your duty to our school!

I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friendswent to the funeral in one car.

Steven Wright

Although I'm Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!

David Chalmers

He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.

J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

John Nuveen

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust l

Plato

If we know that our own men are in a condition to attack, but are unaware that the enemy is not open to attack, we have gone only halfway towards victory.

Sun Tzu

Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.

Kahlil Gibran

This world is but a canvas to our imaginations.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature is not human hearted.

Lao Tzu

The more you give, the less you need.

Stephen Richards

The problem with self-improvement is knowing when to quit.

David Lee Roth

What I respect as far as in myself and in others is the spirit of just doing it. For better or worse, it may work and it may not, but I'm going to go for it. Ultimately I probably prefer to be respected for that than whether it works out or not, either winning or losing.

Hugh Jackman