A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Michel Foucault

Tears such as angels weep.

John Milton

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

Joseph Joubert

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.

Benjamin Disraeli

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.

Giuseppe Mazzini

A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.

Thomas Carlyle

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.

Gore Vidal

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Necessity is the mother of invention is a silly proverb. Necessity is the mother of futile dodges is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

Alfred North Whitehead