I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.

What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?

C.S. Lewis

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

Henri Frederic Amiel

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magic of numbers.

Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medic

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

Gaston Bachelard

I think we need to just be very clear about what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we're not trying to create the perfect democracy. We're never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.

David Cameron

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

Thomas Jefferson

Chivalry is the most delicate form of contempt.

Albert Guerard

And it's absolutely true that male sexual behaviour and female responses to male demands change a lot when they start communicating - and the levels of the communication that I've seen on the ground in very, very poor areas are so high and I think why don't we have that here?

Emma Thompson

Scientists have invented a new strain of cannabis without the high. They celebrated with non-alcoholic beer and furious dry-humping.

Stephen Colbert

If we must fall, we should boldly meet the danger.

Tacitus

A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.

George Eliot