Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.

I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.

Charles de Montesquieu

Democracy functions best when we have an active citizenry.

Rick Perry

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

George Bernard Shaw

If one age believes too much it is natural that another believes too little.

George Earle Buckle

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Benjamin Franklin

Ultimately, so much Dr. Seuss is about empowerment. He invites us to disappear into our imagination and then blows the doors off what that can mean.

Gary Ross

Question authority... Then ignore it!

Joseph Barjack

If he's happy to sit on an electric chair and tell a truth or a lie then I'm happy to sit on an electric chair and we'll see what the outcome is, because I've got no doubt in my mind what happened.

Billy Davies

We are no more free agents than the queen of clubs when she victoriously takes prisoner the knave of hearts.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.

Desiderius Erasmus

It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

Charles Dickens