This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

William Hazlitt

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.

William James

Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.

Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1918

Mens indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

Thucydides

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.

Clifford Geertz

The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pigmies will now start to squabble.

Sir Winston Churchill

It's been a huge blessing, being able to travel and have a great life.

Seann William Scott

Sings. Hope in every sphere of life is a privilege that attaches to action. No action, no hope.

Peter Levi

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

George Bernard Shaw

Of course, I do everything for money.

Christopher Hitchens

My wife and I were happy for twenty. Then we met!

Rodney Dangerfield