What we learn only through the ears makes less impression upon our minds than what is presented to the trustworthy eye.

There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

Thomas Jefferson

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

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him.

Henry L. Stimson

I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.

Thornton Wilder

I feel like everybody is against Floyd Mayweather. I don't get any respect.

Floyd Mayweather, Jr.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

You can't be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline -- it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.

Frank Zappa

If a woman driver ahead of you signals a left turn, be careful, she may turn left.

Source Unknown

Martyrdom... is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

George Bernard Shaw

After making love to this girl she started crying, I said Are you going to hate yourself in the morning, No I hate myself now

Rodney Dangerfield

Love is like that, fragile and light. No wonder it rests upon our hearts in intangible moments, bids us follow fleeting thoughts and ideas and pursue our abstract imaginings.

Belinda Jeffrey

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

George Eliot