I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

Friedrich Engels

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

W. Somerset Maugham

You're not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.

Humphrey Bogart

We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day.

Richard G. Scott

I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing.

Prince Philip Edinburgh

How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.

Catharine Esther Beecher

Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14)

Jean-Yves Leloup

The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

George Reisman

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

John Hawkes

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out -- either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.

David Ogilvy

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No lies, just love.

Conor Oberst