One accusation you can't throw at me is that I've always done my best.

Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs; being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears; what is it else? A madness most discreet, a choking gall, and a preserving sweet.

William Shakespeare

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

Samuel Butler

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Alice Walker

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

Terry Pratchett

It is not my wish to lounge about the college and fatten on a fellowship all my days. I am always trying to look upon a college life as a medium not an end.

Thomas Edward Brown

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I had the strength and the finesse there and put it all together.

Elvis Stojko

A man's true character comes out when he's drunk.

Charles Chaplin

When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.

Frederick Sanger

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails.

Albert Einstein

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.

George Bernard Shaw

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.

Christopher Hitchens