The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I asked him on whom or what he had based his oratorical style. Churchill replied, It was an American statesman who inspired me and taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ. Winston then to my amazement started to quote long excerpts from Bourke Cockran's speeches of 60 years before. He was my model, Churchill said. I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall.

Adlai Stevenson, about his last

Fragrance clings to the hand that gives the rose.

Source Unknown

Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, like other farmers, flourish and complain.

George Crabbe

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Stephen King

Learning makes a man fit company for himself as well as for others.

English Proverb

In Romanticism, the main determinant is the mood, the atmosphere. And in that regard, you could also describe Schubert as a Romantic.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Victor Hugo

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.

George Bernard Shaw

Villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well-camouflaged...Vigilance, Mr. Worf. That is the price we must continually pay.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myself more than others? No. What! if I should be prompt only to punish others and not myself, I should be a wretched indeed! - Javert to M. Madeleine

Victor Hugo

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.

Hannah Whitall Smith

There is no significant man-made Global Warming underway and the science on which the computer projections of weather chaos are based is badly flawed.

John Coleman