If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

George Orwell

The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

John Green

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

Henry Louis Gates

Every day offers us simple gifts when we are willing to search our hearts for the place that's right for each of us. (January 15)

Sarah Breathnach

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

Marguerite Duras

The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader's following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies.As soon as the vacillating masses find themselves facing an opposition that is made up of different groups of enemies their sense of objectivity will be aroused and they will ask how is it that all the others can be in the wrong and they themselves, and their movement, alone in the right.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1

I am not concerned that you have fallen -- I am concerned that you arise.

Abraham Lincoln

I was convicted of three misdemeanors of willful failure to file a form.

Wesley Snipes

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.

Seneca

If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems.

Michael Porter

History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.

Mark Twain