In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted.

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Lao Tzu

If the critics are right that I've made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.

Barack Obama

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

Jean Baudrillard

It has become impossible to give up the enterprise of disarmament without abandoning the whole great adventure of building up a collective peace system.

Arthur Henderson

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.

J.K. Rowling

The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul; if these inner movements are plainly difficult and an effort for him, he is considered soulless.

Friedrich Nietzsche

From Les Miserables:All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night; women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure accents of virgins and the innocent accent of children, -- voices which are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of angels was approaching through the gloom.Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that they must kneel.These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in an uninhabited house. While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.

Victor Hugo

Sometimes I think our problems are made worse by the kind of business we're in. Playing these road shows is a weird experience.

Loretta Lynn

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.

John W. Gardner

My work's never been accepted by my family, but it's something I'll always carry on with.

Johnny Vegas

You know, fathers just have a way of putting everything together.

Erika Cosby