There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

Well, it is so difficult right now when you look out on the road and how fast people go and the more and more cars you see out there, for teenagers, you'd think a kid that literally, a few years before, was sitting back in a car seat in the back seat is now behind the wheel.

Amy Klobuchar

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerus

With a definite, step-by-step plan -- ah, what a difference it makes! You cannot fail, because each step carries you along to the next, like a track

Scott Reed

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

Henry David Thoreau

To me, freedom entitles you to do something, not to not do something.

Shel Silverstein

An honest man is always a child.

Socrates

We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.

Woodrow Wilson

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Huston Smith

I come now to tell you for what I am brought here to die, and to give you an account of my faith, which I shall do as in the sight of the living God before whom I am shortly to stand.

Donald Cargill

Friends humor and flatter us, they steal our time, they encourage our love of ease, they make us content with ourselves, they are the foes of our virtue and our glory.

John Lancaster Spalding

Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance.

Orson Scott Card

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all: it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

H. L. Mencken