This House cannot function without an open, accountable, and independent ethics process and the molestation of that process by the majority is an abuse of power that cannot stand.

Opiate. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.

Ambrose Bierce

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Thomas Jefferson

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!

Albert Einstein

I don't think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.

Elizabeth Gilbert

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

Wallace Stevens

Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all: it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

H. L. Mencken

Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.

Albert Pike

Talent alone won't make you a success. Neither will being in the right place at the right time, unless you are ready. The most important question is: 'Are your ready?'

Johnny Carson

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

Samuel Smiles

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

Jonathan Swift

Speak of the Devil and he appears.

Italian Proverb