Men expect that religion should cost them no pains, that happiness should drop into their laps without any design and endeavor on their part, and that, after they have done what they please while they live, God should snatch them up to heaven when they die. But though the commandments of God be not grievous, yet it is fit to let men know that they are not thus easy.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

David Riesman

My son is now an 'entrepreneur.' That's what you're called when you don't have a job.

Ted Turner

If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine.And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.

Orson Scott Card

And they didn't have to get into a lot of legal speak or talk ER terms, they were real people. I think that's why so many actresses were attracted to it. And it was just about problems that you could identify with so much, right off the bat.

James Denton

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

B. F. Skinner

Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?

Emily Bronte

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand

Right now I'd love to be sitting on a Greek island somewhere because of being Greek American, eating great octopus salad and some fantastic lamb. Or sipping a little ouzo. I think the Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest... Lots of nuts, vegetables, fruits, fresh fish, lean meats, yogurt.

Cat Cora

He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.

Benjamin Franklin

I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I ca

Christopher Hitchens

I mean, I don't think I'm alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind's eye. You don't think they were cute like every other baby?

Dustin Hoffman

I love that quiet time when nobody's up and the animals are all happy to see me.

Olivia Newton-John