Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.

Vigilance is the virtue of vice.

C. J. Weber

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

Clifton Fadiman

History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending? One thing worth defending, I suggest, is the imperative to imagine the lives of beings who are not ourselves and are not like ourselves: animals, plants, gods, spirits, people of other countries, other races, people of the other sex, places and enemies.

Wendell Berry, Peaceableness Tow

Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to.

Joe Biden

I spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.

Nikki Giovanni

Who is so deaf or so blind as he that willfully will neither hear nor see?

English Proverb

I lived on the top of one hill and the school was at the top of another hill. Nobody ever went to school by car - we didn't have any cars during the war. So that to and from school was itself a training.

Roger Bannister

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

George Santayana

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world - its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. If an activity is not grounded in 'to love' or 'to learn,' it does not have value.

Anne Rice

From this process has emerged a parallel process of translating traditional working and living values into a new political and economic power - a power increasingly based upon the strength of money and those material things money can purchase.

Alex Campbell

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

Thomas Jefferson

Love that is not madness is not love.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca