I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.

Unfortunately, corruption is widespread in government agencies and public enterprises. Our political system promotes nepotism and wasting money. This has undermined our legal system and confidence in the functioning of the state. One of the consequences is that many citizens don't pay their taxes.

Georgios A. Papandreou

There is tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries; on such a full sea we are now afloat; and we must take the current the clouds folding and unfolding beyond the horizon. when it serves, or lose our ventures.

William Shakespeare

I just remember Stella Tenant and me dancing in Donatella Versace's bathtub until like four in the morning. It was one of those 'pinch me' moments.

Carolyn Murphy

I'd have you lot up in front of the University authorities first thing in the morning, if it wasn't for the fact that you are the University authorities . . .'

Terry Pratchett

If you can wave a fan, and you can wave a club, can you wave afan club?

Steven Wright

I would as soon put a girl alone into a closet to meditate as give her only the society of her needle.

Maria Mitchell

If you get too attached to how you want it to come out the other side, you freeze. I try to trust that it will work out in the end.

Jennifer Connelly

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Karl Marx

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do today.

Will Rogers

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

Thomas Carlyle, History of the F

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

Christopher Hitchens

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

Marcus Aurelius