Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, He will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.What Heine expresses as a kind of joke is, according to Freud, a deep psychological truth: along with the innate human drive for pleasure there is also an equally innate drive to inflict pain upon others. This impulse estranges people from one another and renders them decidedly antisocial.~ Lee Hardy, The Fabric of this World

I don't live with people, that's why my relationships last. I'm not romantic. Even when I was a teenager if somebody asked if they could hold my hand I'd say, - no, it's not heavy, I can hold it myself, thank you'.

Paul O'Grady

During the 1950s, Aristotle Onassis and I formed what grew to be a close friendship and association in several business ventures.

Paul Getty

Don't fight forces, use them.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.

Henry David Thoreau

Ability is nothing without opportunity.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan -- spoiled.

Israel Zangwill

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

Confucius

I don't like definitions, but if there is a definition of freedom, it would be when you have control over your reality to transform it, to change it, rather than having it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than.

Mark Knopfler

A memorandum is not written to inform the reader, but to protect the writer.

Dean Acheson

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

John Andrew Holmes

Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.

Naomi Wolf

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

Steve Martin