Love is by far bigger than the government can ever be.

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

Neil Young

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.

Edward Everett

Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.

Laurence Sterne

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Arthur Koestler

Philanthropy is. . . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain.

Henry David Thoreau

life is either a reproducible, almost commonplace manifestation of matter, given certain conditions, or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in between.

Christian de Duve

I went to school in drag, in art school and my day was completely different because everybody thought I was a chick. You should see me as a chick. So I went as a girl, as like an experiment and it worked really well and everyone was really nice to me but I couldn't talk obviously...you know train conductors were really cool to me on my commute...HA! I looked hot as a chick!

Gerard Way

Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.

Leo Tolstoy

That a marriage ends is less than ideal but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

John Updike

Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so.

Christopher Hitchens

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

Henry Adams

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

G. M. Trevelyan