There is no room for legal hair-splitting when it comes to the humane treatment of detainees - not in a nation founded on the rule of law and respect for human rights.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Clifford Geertz

In great straits and when hope is small, the boldest counsels are the safest.

Livy

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

Jodi Picoult

Still a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me.

General Robert E. Lee

There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

David Byrne

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.

Ronald Reagan

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself

Ursula K. LeGuin

I feel when somebody has been playing cricket for a long time, he creates a separate identity for himself.

Sachin Tendulkar

Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners.

Lord Chesterfield

Man lies down and does not rise until the heavens are no more. They will not awake nor arise from their sleep.

James Dye

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

James Madison

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.

Helen Rowland