The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

We've got people looking at our seamy side and our sad side a lot of the time because that's easier. It's much more difficult to make a film about happiness with lots of jokes in it.

Emma Thompson

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

Kahlil Gibran

Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

Oscar Wilde

I take great comfort in having people around who can walk in my office and tell me what's on their mind. Part of my job is -- they say, what's your job? My job is decision-maker. I make a lot of decisions. Obviously, some of which you've seen, and a lot of them you don't. And they're big ones and little ones. But you make a lot of decisions. And if you don't -- if you're uncertain about all the facts surrounding a decision, you've got to rely upon people. And you've then got to create an environment in which people are willing to come in and say, here's what's on my mind.It's important at the presidential level. It's important in business. You've got to have people comfortable about saying, Here's what I think you ought to do, Mr. CEO. You've got to listen and have a -- I've always believed in a flat organizational chart. I think the worst thing that can happen for decision-makers is to get a filtered point of view.

George W. Bush, Importance of Sm

But men never violate the laws of God without suffering the consequences, sooner or later.

Lydia Maria Child

Our cattlemen have given us the safest, most abundant, most affordable beef supply in the world and I trust their judgment. And if you look at consumer confidence in this country, so does the American public.

Norm Coleman

We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.

Kate Millett

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

John Milton

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Charles Dickens

One is led astray alike by sympathy and coldness, by praise and by blame

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Feminist Me says that a woman's right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps.

Julie Burchill