I'm beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

We assemble parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their collected wisdom; but we necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices, and private interests. By the help of these, artful men overpower their wisdom, and dupe its possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, arrets, and edicts, all the world over, for regulating commerce, an assembly of great men is the greatest fool upon earth.

Benjamin Franklin

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist when asked if he is a Newtonian, or if he is a Pasteurian.There are truths so evident, so much a part of people's knowledge, that it is now useless to discuss them.

Che Guevara

Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals.

Finley Peter Dunne

You just can't complain about being alive. It's self-indulgent to be unhappy. When asked how she has coped since husband's death.

Gena Rowland

To succeed in your mission, you must have single-minded devotion to your goal.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.

Sigmund Freud

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

John Muir

You can map your life through your favorite movies, and no two people's maps will be the same.

Mary Schmich

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

Eric Hoffer

We are all born alone and die alone. The loneliness is definitely part of the journey of life.

Jenova Chen

A person, who no matter how desperate the situation, gives others hope, is a true leader.

Daisaku Ikeda

Individualism, as a definition of holding to personal ideals, is classed as obstinacy and anti-social. Inevitably we run point blank into the evils of compromise. When compromise enters our moral fiber, it spreads like a cancerous growth. We think we plan adequate safeguards around areas in which we contemplate yielding our standards, but once we lower the fence and break our strong will to do right, come what may, we expose ourselves to forces that spread beyond control. Compromise always starts on some rather insignificant principle. The dangers of yielding seem negligible and we usually risk those things first where observation and detection by others is difficult. We thus seek to avoid censure and discipline. In a short time we find ourselves trading our principles for false values and doing it in the black market of human relationships. . . .

Ralph W. Hardy