There is nothing happens to any person but what was in his power to go through with.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

John Adams

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

And when night, darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

John Milton

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

A. E. van Vogt

When I give I give myself.

Walt Whitman

Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination.

Mary Douglas

How do you explain the bond between man and wife? Well, for one thing, it's private. What people do in their own marriage is their own business.

Robin Gibb

Love doesn't want people to stay ignorant and frightened. Love doesn't value obedience over all else. Love doesn't judge and find some lives--or loves--more valuable than others. Love doesn't use people and throw them away. Love stays, and makes you stronger, even when the person you love is gone.

Stacey Jay

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Unhurt people are not much good in the world.

Enid Starkie

Equal rights for all, special privileges for none

Thomas Jefferson

The great men among the ancients understood very well how to reconcile manual labour with affairs of state, and thought it no lessening to their dignity to make the one the recreation to the other. That indeed which seems most generally to have employed and diverted their spare hours, was agriculture. Gideon among the Jews was taken from threshing, as well as Cincinnatus amongst the Romans from the plough, to command the armies of their countries...and, as I remember, Cyrus thought gardening so little beneath the dignity and grandeur of a throne, that he showed Xenophon a large field of fruit trees all of his own planting . . . Delving, planting, inoculating, or any the like profitable employments would be no less a diversion than any of the idle sports in fashion, if men could be brought to delight in them.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Gov