Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.

My pet-sitting day ends around sunset, and it's very satisfying to know that I've made several living beings happy that day. That I left their food bowls sparkling clean and fresh water in their water bowls. That I brushed them so their coats shined, and played with them until all our hearts were beating faster. That I kissed them goodbye and left them with their tails wagging or flipping or at least raised in a happy kind of way. That's a heck of a lot more than any president, pope, prime minister, or potentate can say, and I wouldn't switch places with any of them.

Blaize Clement

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

Andrew Motion

I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott

The vampire was a complete change from the usual romantic characters I was playing, but it was a success.

Bela Lugosi

There comes a pause, for human strength will not endure to dance without cessation; and everyone must reach the point at length of absolute prostration.

Lewis Carroll

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We begin from the recognition that all beings cherish happiness and do not want suffering. It then becomes both morally wrong and pragmatically unwise to pursue only one's own happiness oblivious to the feelings and aspirations of all others who surround us as members of the same human family. The wiser course is to think of others when pursuing our own happiness.

Dalai Lama

The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.

Alexander Hamilton

We cannot define these things without obscuring them, while we speak of them with all assurance....our doubts cannot take away all the clearness, nor our own natural lights chase away all the darkness.

Blaise Pascal

Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.

George Steiner

Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.

Henry Ward Beecher

In isolated or country places no man's life is safe.

John White Geary