Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics, it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar.

Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

Leo Tolstoy

A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.

Feoude

I carry groceries home on the tank of my motorcycle.

Stephan Jenkins

I do believe at the end of the night when you're with your family, the character gets hung up on the door like a coat, and is there to be taken on the next morning.

Liam Neeson

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Henry David Thoreau

I am not willing that this discussion should close without mention of the value of a true teacher. Give me a log hut, with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other, and you may have all the buildings, apparatus and libraries without him.

James Garfield, Address to Willi

Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.

Carl Schurz

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Hannah Arendt

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Pamela Hansford Johnson

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

R. D. Laing

My mom FedExes a red velvet cake she makes from scratch to me every birthday.

Molly Sims

Some find that they are content with little, while others find that they want much, much more. Still others create and manifest many things, only to later discover that it was the creation which brought them greater joy and satisfaction, more so than the actual possession or enjoyment of those creations.

Stephen Richards