We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

George Bernard Shaw

We're all the same. We all want the same thing in life. Everybody going around like ants and we all want the same thing. And it's not one queen. It's not one queen with the wings.

Andrea Corr

I was never less alone than when by myself.

Edward Gibbon

I do not believe that Congress or the Administration should prohibit the medical community from pursuing a promising avenue of research that may improve the lives of millions of Americans.

Tom Allen

I have a stepladder. It's a very nice stepladder but it's sad that I never knew my real ladder.

Craig Charles

Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Voltaire

Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.

Friedrich Nietzsche

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness -- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

Norman Mailer

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man.

Thomas Jefferson

Humility and knowledge in poor clothes excel pride and ignorance in costly attire.

William Penn

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.

Leo Tolstoy

Never enter into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.

Thomas Jefferson