There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.

When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me.

Fidel Castro, "The Economist", A

The last time doesn't exist. It's only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There's only now.

Bill Murray

Anything that is wasted effort represents wasted time. The best management of our time thus becomes linked inseparably with the best utilization of our efforts.

Ted W. Engstrom

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

Malcolm Bradbury

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.

Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov)

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

Adrienne Rich

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.original French: Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d

Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way, 1

The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.

E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

Scepticism is the first step towards truth.

Denis Diderot

A sail boat that sails backwards can never see the sun rise.

Bill Cosby

Our humility rest upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

Margaret Mead

The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein