A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

Mao Zedong

Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen.

Paul Ricoeur

It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

Virginia Woolf

I am thirty-three -- the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus; an age fatal to revolutionists.

Camille Desmoulins

My primary school teacher once poured a bottle of curdled school milk forcefully down my throat. Then I threw it up all over her suede shoes. I'd rather have drunk from the spittoon in Barney's barber shop.

Paul O'Grady

You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Eldridge Cleaver

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

Leo Tolstoy

I am not influenced by the expectation of promotion or pecuniary reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public good, becomes honorable by being necessary.

Nathan Hale

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Clifford Geertz

To wilful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters.

William Shakespeare

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.

Maya Angelou

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Carl Jung