Medicine makes people ill, mathematics makes them sad, and theology makes them sinful

From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution...It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation.

Bertrand Russell

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

Edward George BulwerLytton

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein

Age acquires no value save through thought and discipline.

James Truslow Adams

I figure no matter how old you are, it's always going to be your first marriage and no life experience is going to make you a better judge of who you should marry.

Utada Hikaru

If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

Denis Johnson

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be - although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

David Cronenberg

I hardly teach. It's more like a gathering of minds looking at one subject and learning from each other. I enjoy the process.

Fay Godwin

Love is a durable fire in the mind ever burning; never sick, never old, never dead from itself never turning.

Walter Raleigh, Sr.

There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

Christopher Hitchens

The Thames is liquid history.

John Burns

We Orientals find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness which that thing provides.

Junichiro Tanizaki