[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.

When a favor is shown to a white man, he feels it in his head and the tongue speaks out; when a kindness is shown to an Indian, he feels it in his heart and the heart has no tongue.

American Indian Proverb, Shoshon

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world - that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Maxine Hong Kingston

It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.

Ben Stein

A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.

William J. Clinton

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

I graduated pretty quickly. When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids. I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never said a word in public. I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind's eye.... But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes.... Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro.http://www.africawithin.com/bios/medgar_evers.htm

Medgar Evers, quoted in The Mart

Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

John Green

All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.

Benjamin Franklin

The lazy man works the hardest.

Anonymous

And you, systematic Utopians, who make an abstraction of human nature, fomentors of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds, emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of the simian race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied: you shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be the high-priests of an abominable future!

Comte de Falloux

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

Albert Camus