On Thanksgiving Day, all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment -- half- time.

We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.

William O. Douglas

The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to.

Jodi Picoult

Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Plato

The two qualities which chiefly inspire regard and affection Are that a thing is your own and that it is your only one.

Aristotle

ihave often noticed thatancestors never boastof the descendants who boastof ancestors i wouldrather start a family thanfinish one blood will tell but oftenit tells too much

Don Marquis

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

Thomas Merton

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life - birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.

Michael Shermer, Why People Beli

I myself spent hours at the Columbia library as intimidated and embarassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the world's cuisines, past and present, was available on request.

Luigi Barzini

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.

Christopher Hitchens

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Of neighborhoods, benevolence is the most beautiful. How can the man be considered wise who when he had the choice does not settle in benevolence.

Confucius