Our mind is like a cloudy sky: in essence clear and pure, but overcast by clouds of delusions. Just as the thickest clouds can disperse, so, too, even the heaviest delusions can be removed from our mind.

No more good must be attempted than the people can bear.

Thomas Jefferson

To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it's no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.

Marlene Dietrich

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

Graham Greene

Insult is powerful. Insult begets both rage and humor and often at the same time.

Suzanne Fields

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

Thomas Jefferson

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

Thomas B. Macaulay

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

Oscar Wilde

They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures.

Henry David Thoreau

A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man . . . A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

Thomas Carlyle

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.

Thomas Frank

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

Joseph Conrad

In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

Zadie Smith