Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.

Speak only if it improves upon the silence.

Mahatma Gandhi

Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

Dejan Stojanovic

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Leo Tolstoy

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?

Rabbi Hillel

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.

Karl Marx

Some reformers may urge that in the ages distant future, patriotism, like the habit of monogamous marriage, will become a needless and obsolete virtue; but just at present the man who loves other countries as much as he does his own is quite as noxious a member of society as the man who loves other women as much as he loves his wife. Love of country is an elemental virtue, like love of home.

Theodore Roosevelt

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

A. R. Ammons

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

Henry David Thoreau

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.

LaoTzu

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

Thomas Jefferson

We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused -- in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery -- by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press -- their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.

Edgar Allan Poe

If a person can be said to have the wrong attitude, there is no need to pay attention to his arguments.

John McCarthy