Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

The most important thing for me was to never, ever, ever deny it. But I didn't really have the courage to talk about it. I was thinking, The people who need to know I'm gay know.

Portia de Rossi

An early-rising man... a good spouse but a bad husband.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

George Orwell

Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to...Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth.

Oscar Wilde

Ordinary people think that talent must be always on its own level and that it arises every morning like the sun, rested and refreshed, ready to draw from the same storehouse -- always open, always full, always abundant -- new treasures that it will heap up on those of the day before; such people are unaware that, as in the case of all mortal things, talent has its increase and decrease, and that independently of the career it takes, like everything that breathes... it undergoes all the accidents of health, of sickness, and of the dispositions of the soul -- its gaiety or its sadness. As with our perishable flesh. talent is obliged constantly to keep guard over itself, to combat, and to keep perpetually on the alert amid the obstacles that witness the exercise of its singular power.

Eugene Delacroix

The perfecting of one's self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development.

Confucius

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

Dale Carnegie

A calcined, scalped, rasped, scraped, flayed, broiled, powdered, leprous, blotched, mangy, grimy, parboiled country without trees, water, grass, fields ... it is infinitely liker hell than earth, and one looks for tails among the people.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, desc

I just tried to keep my cool and continue with my race plan: to win.

Mark Spitz

I am not a morning person. I like to sleep in.

Martha Plimpton

The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.

Stephen Gardiner

Some people put up a peace sign with one hand. Some people put up the middle finger instead. I use two hands and put up both.

Brian Celio