Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content.

My mom told me to do whatever I wanted to do and don't get too anxious about it.

David Giuntoli

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?

Erica Jong

Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.

George Santayana

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

Virginia Woolf

We are all serving a life sentence, and good behavior is our only hope for a pardon.

Doug Horton

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

C. S. Lewis

Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you, or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert

Kahlil Gibran

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.

Thomas Reid

I have sought love because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven the saints and poets have imagined

Bertrand Russell

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

David Sarnoff

The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.

Johann von Goethe

We learn from failure much more than from success; we often discover what we will do by finding our what we will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Samuel Smiles