This is an inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling up beyond a certain height knowledge which is in itself mere trash and lumber to a man whose life is to be one long fight with death and disease, there will be some sharp questions asked by and by.

The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.

Edmund Burke

My grandfather and my uncle both died from colorectal cancer, my dad almost died from it and I have the gene for it.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him

Jeremy Aldana

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

James Madison

Desire is a powerful force that can be used to make things happen.

Marcia Wieder

I've done some TV and I've done a lot of theater, obviously, and the last character I played on Broadway was a very fast-talking broad. I'm used to learning material and words.

Sutton Foster

The level of the development of a country is determined, in considerable part, by the level of development of its people's intelligence.

Luis Albert Machado

I am his mistress. His work is his wife.

Marion Javits

You work on things and you have such faith in them while you're making them that everything feels special - in a way.

Guy Pearce

They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality has a name. . . . It is conscious and alert, it does things like dining out, answering letters, etc., and it differs vividly and amusingly from other personalities. The lower personality is a very queer affair. In many ways it is a perfect fool, but without it there is no literature, because unless a man dips a bucket down into it occasionally he cannot produce first-class work. There is something general about it. Although it is inside S. T. Coleridge, it cannot be labelled with his name. It has something in common with all other deeper personalities, and the mystic will assert that the common quality is God, and that here, in the obscure recesses of our being, we near the gates of the Divine. It is in any case the force that makes for anonymity. As it came from the depths, so it soars to the heights, out of local questionings; as it is general to all men, so the works it inspires have something general about them, namely beauty. The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read. What is so wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse. Lost in the beauty where he was lost, we find more than we ever threw away, we reach what seems to be our spiritual home, and remember that it was not the speaker who was in the beginning but the Word.

E. M. Forster, Anonymity: an Enq

You can only be as good as you dare to be bad.

John Barrymore

You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.

Terry Pratchett