What we wish, that we readily believe.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

George Washington

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

Robert Browning

In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect... and no.

Jane Haddam

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

George Eliot

Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age.

Albert Einstein

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

JeanClaude Van Damme

The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.

Oscar Wilde

Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis -- German National Socialism.

Hermann Goering

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

Aldous Huxley

And wilt thou have me fashion into speechThe love I bear thee, finding words enough,And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,Between our faces, to cast light on each? -I dropt it at thy feet. I cannot teachMy hand to hold my spirits so far offFrom myself--me--that I should bring thee proofIn words, of love hid in me out of reach.Nay, let the silence of my womanhoodCommend my woman-love to thy belief, -Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,And rend the garment of my life, in brief,By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers.

Ruth Benedict