Life

All histories do show, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.

Sir Walter Raleigh

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Mark Twain

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!--and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delighteth not me...

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

Socrates

Like all technology, social media is neutral but is best put to work in the service of building a better world.

Simon Mainwaring

He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold.

Kurt Vonnegut

The world is starving for original and decisive leadership.

Bryant McGill

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

Michel Foucault

Crying wouldn't help anything now.

Cassandra Clare

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Arthur Koestler