Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

Thomas Wolfe

He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts.

Richard Whately

Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

Oscar Wilde

You can will an act of service but you cannot will love.

Anthony de Mello

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

Oscar Wilde

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

Barack Obama

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

Napoleon Hill

Our passion are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.

Johann von Goethe

A lie with a purpose is one of the worst kind, and the most profitable.

Finley Peter Dunne

Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.

Herbert Hoover

It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.

Leon Kass

For out of olde feldes, as men seith, Cometh al this new corn fro yeer to yere; And out of olde bokes, in good feith, Cometh al this newe science that men lere.

Geoffrey Chaucer