An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Robert Byrne

What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.

Albrecht Durer

A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

George Santayana

Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work.

John Garamendi

Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love.

Francis of Assisi

I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.

Ani DiFranco

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.

Michelangelo

That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a disputable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.

Aristotle

The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we'll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.

Joshua Foer

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuc

Civil war... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as 'foreign war'? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers? Wars could only be defined by their aims. There were no 'foreign' or 'civil' wars, only wars that were just or unjust. Until the great universal concord could be arrived at, warfare, at least when it was the battle between the urgent future and the dragging past, might be unavoidable. How could such a war be condemned? War is not shameful, nor the sword-thrust a stab in the back, except when it serves to kill right and progress, reason, civilization, and truth. When this is war's purpose it maeks no difference whether it is civil or foreign war - it is a crime. Outside the sacred cause for justice, what grounds has one kind of war for denigrating another? By what right does the sword of Washington despise the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Which is the greater - Leonidas fighting the foreign enemy or Timoleon slaying the tyrant who was his brother? One was a defender, the other a liberator. Are we to condemn every resort to arms that takes place within the citadel, without concerning ourselves with its aim?

Victor Hugo

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

Don DeLillo