Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.

The truth only irritates those it enlightens, but does not convert.

Pasquier Quesnel

People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

John Hodgman

As founder and co-chair of the upper Mississippi River Congressional task force, I have long sought to preserve the river's health and historical multiple uses, including as a natural waterway and a home to wildlife, for the benefit of future generations of Americans.

Ron Kind

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

David Miliband

We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.

Ellen Goodman

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

E. M. Forster

Science is not religion. We're not going to be able to answer the why questions. But when you put together all of what we know about the universe, it fits together amazingly well.

Lisa Randall

But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dori

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world - no ideals.

Golda Meir

I don't think I was funny until college. I lived with some Harvard MD/PhD students - they were so smart, and what I contributed to the house was, I was the funny one.

Wendy Liebman

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done

Simone Weil