All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy.http://www.mencken.org/text/txt001/elliott.leo.1998.mencken-01.htm

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

James Baldwin

In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.

Carl Gustav Jung

As a child of God, I am greater than anything that can happen to me.

Abdul Kalam

With children... it is a fact that most parents criticize children more than they laud or congratulate them. We tend to be quick to criticize, slow to praise. We should be careful to keep the praise and the expectations far ahead of the criticism.

Source Unknown

Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.

Kingsley Amis

The most important thing you can do to achieve your goals is to make sure that as soon as you set them, you immediately begin to create momentum. The most important rules that I ever adopted to help me in achieving my goals were those I learned from a very successful man who taught me to first write down the goal, and then to never leave the site of setting a goal without firs taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.

Anthony Robbins

Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship - never.

Charles Caleb Colton

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

Roland Barthes

Giving up even an ounce of precious freedom is a very serious thing to do.

Charles Schumer

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Oscar Wilde

...there is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of the objects. And we, and our judgement, and all mortal things else do uncessantly roll, turn, and passe away. Thus can nothing be certainly established, nor of the one, nor of the other; both the judging and the judged being in continual alteration and motion. We have no communication with being; for every humane nature is ever in the middle between being borne and dying; giving nothing of itself but an obscure appearance and shadow, and an uncertain and weak opinion. And if perhaps you fix your thought to take its being, it would be even as if one should go about to grasp the water: for how much the more he shall close and press that, which by its own nature is ever gliding, so much the more he shall loose what he would hold and fasten. Thus, seeing all things are subject to passe from one real change to another, reason, which therein seeketh a real subsistence, finds herself deceived as unable to apprehend any thing subsistent and permanent...

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in

THUMB, I HOPE I WILL NOT BORE YOU WITH HOW TOTALLY, TOTALLY I ADORE YOU. THE FUNNY WAY YOU HAVE OF TALKING, THE CUTE WAY YOU HAVE OF WALKING. PLEASE DO NOT FEEL THAT I AM STALKING YOU. LOVE, HENDERSON

Phoebe Stone