People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else.

One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.

Rosamond Lehman

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

George Eliot

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes [Letter to von Humboldt, 1813].

Thomas Jefferson

One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.

Eugene O'Neill

Movies are like magic tricks.

Jeff Bridges

All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.

Danny Thomas

Why do I have this imagination? It's the only one I've got!

Neil Gaiman

My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of &pound10, you could sail your entire family out to Australia, so that's what my father chose to do.

Hugh Jackman

I may have been the only candidate in America who failed to ride the wave of anti-establishment anger to victory.

Mickey Kaus

My dad never blew anything up, but he probably had friends who did. He and my mom have always preached that the pen is mightier than a Molotov cocktail.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Ask with urgency and passion.

Arthur Balfour

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

William Shakespeare