Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

Mark Twain

I use the film industry as a pleasure for work and that kind of thing and it's not a pursuit to make me feel happy in my life.

Thandie Newton

Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it

Bertrand Russell

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, and that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Only the universal ethic of the feeling of responsibility in an ever-widening sphere for all that livesonly that ethic can be founded in thought. The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends within itself everything that can be described as love, devotion, and sympathy whether in suffering, joy, or effort.

Albert Schweitzer

The great leaders have always stage-managed their effects.

Charles de Gaulle

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

The truest lengthening of life is to live while we live, wasting no time but using every hour for the highest ends. So be it this day.

C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon,

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Russell Baker

Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.

James Garfield

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Salman Rushdie

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

Graham Greene

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

Michel de Montaigne