No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.

Jane Austen

Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?

Mary Douglas

I was very active in the peace movement, still am.

Margot Kidder

Killing rips the soul apart.

J.K. Rowling

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.

Bernard Baruch

A young person, to achieve, must first get out of his mind any notion either of the ease or rapidity of success. Nothing ever just happens in this world.

Edward William Bok

We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.

Aldo Leopold

Remove the temptation of idleness and cupids bow is useless.

Ovid

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

W. H. Auden

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Henri Matisse

We count our miseries carefully, and accept our blessings without much thought.

Chinese Proverb