War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.

I always made my food congenial to my constitution, and my health was always excellent.

Giacomo Casanova

Granted there are instances in which children have been reared in an atmosphere of inconsistency where value training of any kind was entirely missing; but even in these cases, it is the lack of loving guidance and structure rather than the lack of punitive retribution that has triggered the behavioral manifestations of delinquency. In a high percentage of court cases, there is evidence that the child has met with punishment that has not only been frequent but in many cases excessive. In fact, one of the sources of the child's own inadequate development is the model of open violence provided by the parent who has resorted repeatedly to corporal punishment, usually because of his own limited imagination. This indoctrination into a world where only might makes right and where all strength is invested in the authority of the mother or of the father not only makes it easy for the child to develop aggressive patterns of behavior but makes him emotionally distant and distrustful.

Sydney Smith, quoted by by Karl

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.

Christopher Hitchens

Be as you wish to seem.

Socrates

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Bertrand Russell

Is it treason to say the truth? A bitter truth, but no less true for that.

George R. R. Martin

A hard beginning maketh a good ending.

John Heywood

In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...

Leo Tolstoy

Change cannot and will not happen overnight. But the intent to evolve will produce opportunities for growth.

Robin D. Hart

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Henry James

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Thomas Jefferson