What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.

Your aim will be knowledge and wisdom, not the reflected glamour of fame.

Abbott L. Lowell

I had fun pretending to be a sportscaster. People always think that was a down thing for me. I had the best job in sports broadcasting for two years.

Dennis Miller

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

William Empson

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

James A. Baldwin

So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master -- so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil -- so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

I do not admire a virtue like valour when it is pushed to excess, if I do not see at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue, as one does in Epaminondas, who displayed extreme valour and extreme benevolence. For otherwise it is not an ascent, but a fall. We do not display our greatness by placing ourselves at one extremity, but rather by being at both at the same time, and filling up the whole of the space between them.

Blaise Pascal

A character is a completely fashioned will.

Novalis

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Thomas Paine

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

Oscar Wilde

When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength—400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that.

Elon Musk

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

Jesse Jackson