I knew a girl that was so ugly that... I took her to the top of the Empire State building and planes started to attack her.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Power must be used, but it must be tempered by soul-searching and the recognition of our human capacity for error. That is the maxim that should inform our approach to every challenge, from reforming state government to engaging in foreign affairs.

Eliot Spitzer

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

William Shakespeare

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Mark Twain

When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.

George McGovern

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

Gloria Steinem

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers in the first place.

Lord Halifax

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order.But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver.

Edward Abbey, Writer's Credo

I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving.

David Attenborough

Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierceInto the heights of love's rare universe,Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychid

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

Nelson Algren