I hope... that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for in my opinion there never was a good war, or a bad peace.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secretes too much jelly.

Virginia Woolf

A man's life is happy, says Pascal, if he begins by being in love and ends by being ambitious. It will be still happier if, after all his ambitions have been satisfied, it ends in tranquility.

Andre Maurois

My mom being a psychotherapist, I've been brought up with that whole psychoanalytical terrain.

Helena Bonham Carter

Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

William Hazlitt

Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.

Robert M. Gates

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Herman Melville

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

Samuel Butler

It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

Denis Diderot

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Paul Cezanne

Every man wishes to rule the world. Unfortunately, the world rules every man.

Jeremy P. Johnson

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom