Public lives are lived out on the job and in the marketplace, where certain rules, conventions, laws, and social customs keep most of us in line. Private lives are lived out in the presence of family, friends, and neighbors who must be considered and respected even though the rules and proscriptions are looser than what's allowed in public. But in our secret lives, inside our own heads, almost anything goes.

Man is not only a contributory creature, but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece of the world, but the world itself; and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.

John Donne

I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

Jim Garrison

A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle. Proverbs 18:19

Bible

Nothing matters more to the future of this Nation than insuring that our young men and women learn to believe in themselves and believe in their dreams, and that they develop this capacitythat you develop this capacity, so that you keep it all of your lives. I believe one of Americas most priceless assets is the idealism which motivates the young people of America. My generation has invested all that it has, not only its love but its hope and faith, in yours.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.

John Betjeman

Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.

Jodi Picoult

My father told me that if you saw a man in a Rolls Royce you could be sure he was not a gentleman unless he was the chauffeur.

Earl of Arran

I remain just one thing, and one thing only -- and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

Charlie Chaplin

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

He who has not the weakness of friendship has not the strength.

Joseph Joubert

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant? Instead they say, No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way. A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Carl Sagan

People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.

Lawrence Durrell