You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

George Orwell

We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that's all we can promise in truth.

Lillian Hellman

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death

Mark Twain

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

Charles Hughes

Over the years with movies, I've given directors notes.

Harvey Weinstein

One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.

Albert Einstein

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

C.S. Lewis

Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.

Matthew Arnold

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway

If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do.

Orson Scott Card

Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?

Anonymous