The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

We sat together as a family for dinner at night. And my mother had a job. My dad had a job. But there was always a meal on the table at 6:00, you know.

Trisha Yearwood

You, the foreign media, have been the companion of my people in its long and painful journey to freedom.

Corazon Aquino

How now, wit! Whither wander you?

William Shakespeare

The first reaction to truth is hatred.

Tertullian

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:1492The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:[image]Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.Color was everything.Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas bl

Kurt Vonnegut

Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!

Terry Pratchett

There's a great joy in my giving. It's thrilling. It's exhilarating. It's important to be a part of sharing. It is my love. It is my joy.

W. Clement Stone

Presents don't really mean much to me. I don't want to sound mawkish, but - it was the realization that I have a great many people in my life who really love me, and who I really love.

Gabriel Byrne

I love my parents. Coming out to them was sort of coming out to myself. I educated them, and I wanted our relationship to keep growing. I wanted them to be a part of my life still. I wanted to be able to share with them what I was going through.

Randy Harrison

It would be Spiderman. I'd love to be Peter Parker.

Casper Van Dien

The wisdom of many and the wit of one.

John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.

Janet Malcolm