It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always the most agreeable nor the best to live with.

In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side, thinking they will be more comfortable.

Johann von Goethe

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

Stanley Kubrick

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.

Edmund Burke

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

Garrison Keillor

Someday, Will, I will go where none can follow me, and I think it will be sooner rather than later. Have you ever asked yourself why I agreed to be your parabatai?

Cassandra Clare

I think the most important thing in life is self-love, because if you don't have self-love, and respect for everything about your own body, your own soul, your own capsule, then how can you have an authentic relationship with anyone else?

Shailene Woodley

It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.

Bertrand Russell

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purposeand you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, I see no probability of the British invading us but he will say to you be silent; I see it, if you dont. The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

Abraham Lincoln

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

George Eliot

I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.

Rob Sheffield