Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall - that is my strength, my only strength.

Antonio Gramsci

God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.

William Ellery Channing

If we want to know what happiness is we must seek it, not as if it were a part of gold at the end of the rainbow, but among human beings who are living richly and fully the good life. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double Dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar gold button that has rolled under the cupboard in his bed room. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living 24 crowded hours of the day. If you live only for yourself you are always an immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests. No one has learned the meaning of living until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellowmen. If your ambition has the momentum of an express train at full speed, if you can no longer stop your mad rush for glory, power, or intellectual supremacy, try to divert your energies into socially useful channels before it is too late.For those who seek the larger happiness and greater effectiveness open to human beings there can be but one philosophy of life, a philosophy of constructive altruism. The truly happy man is always a fighting optimist. Optimism includes not only altruism but also social responsibility, social courage and objectivity. The good life demands a working philosophy as an orientating map of conduct. This is the golden way of life. This is the satisfying life. This is the way to be happy though human.

W. Beran Wolfe, 'How To Be Happy

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.

Eric Hoffer

True education is limited to those people who would die without knowing, whereas the masses in the institutions are merely going through the motions, for education is a way of living.

Bryant H. McGill

What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

Thomas Carlyle

I've always considered myself to be fiercely patriotic. I love Britain - its history and the down-to-earth attitude people have.

Gary Numan

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

Rebecca West

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Henry Adams

The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.

George Sand

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

Ezra Pound

One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged

Heinrich Heine