A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.

W. Somerset Maugham

Session musicians kind of respected me because what I was talking about made sense. That all came from an education. Believe me, education does you more good. Maybe that's the reason I've been around so long.

Bobby Vinton

Men should pledge themselves to nothing for reflection makes a liar of their resolution.

Sophocles

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.

Samuel Goldwyn

You don't want to get the same kind of advice from everyone on your board.

Ruben Cardenas

At one time, we all were Gods.

Bjorn Street

By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a noble animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward--you will never get her full confidence again.http://www.twainquotes.com

Mark Twain, Mark Twain, a Biogra

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

John Updike, Piet Hanema, in Cou

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

Adolf Loos

The key to your universe is that you can choose.

Frederick (Carl) Frieseke

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson, (attribu

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

Christopher Hitchens