The truth is that our way of celebrating the Christmas season does spring from myriad cultures and sources, from St. Nicholas to Coca-Cola advertising campaigns.

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.

E. W. Howe

Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.

James Wolcott

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

Samuel Johnson

Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination.

Mary Douglas

Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

How can people hold these opinions? What joy can we find in the expectation of nothing but hopeless misery? What reason for boasting that we are in impenetrable darkness? And how can it happen that the following argument occurs to a reasonable man?

Blaise Pascal

We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them

Albert Einstein

Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.

Henry Lawson

I didn't want to set up a women's studies program. I thought women should learn to operate in a coeducational atmosphere, because, especially in national security and international affairs, it's male-dominated.

Madeleine Albright

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary a qualification for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.

H. G. Wells

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Henry David Thoreau