Know then thyself, presume not God to scan The proper study of mankind is man.

Man that is of woman born is apt to be as vain has his mother.

Robert Frost

Truth is too big a price to pay for the luxury of avoiding pain now and then.

Vanna Bonta

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

H. L. Mencken

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Francis Bacon

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.

Mark Twain

Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.

Charles Lindbergh

Never refuse an assignment except when there is a conflict of interest, a potential of danger to you or your family, or you hold a strongly biased attitude about the subject under focus.

Jessica Savitch

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

Zora Neale Hurston

Never say never

Charles Dickens

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

Talk is cheap - except when Congress does it.

Cullen Hightower

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

Christopher Hitchens