Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong, but you'll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.

Ben Goldacre

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream... I see children playing on the grass, ...they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with anther, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game.

Judge Learned Hand

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, Well! give me peace in my day. Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Thomas Paine, The American Crisi

If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a 'peace conference,' you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.

Joseph Stalin

We cannot look at the child who has been raped and offer the theological maxim that God will draw something good from out of this. We cannot think of the children consumed by the fires of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and manufacture some easy gratitude. Gratitude does not take away the horrors of violence.

Ellen Vaughn, Radical Gratitude

When women hold off from marrying men, we call it independence. When men hold off from marrying women, we call it fear of commitment.

Warren Farrell

With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

David Byrne

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

Mikhail Bakunin

Sometimes you got sunsets so pink that they had no style at all.

Terry Pratchett

It couldn't be a simpler answer. Marriage doesn't really mean anything to me. I feel like in many ways marriage is more for the families of the couple than for the people involved, so I don't gravitate to it.

Jon Hamm

He that can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and God in everything.

Baltasar Gracian