What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

Thomas Hobbes

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.

Harry S. Truman

My husband, Sal, and I put date nights on the calendar once a week. I know that doesn't sound romantic, but otherwise it won't get done.

Sherri Shepherd

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

E. O. Wilson

I wish I had the voice of Homer to sing of rectal carcinoma.

J.B.S. Haldane

I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night - and that went on for eight years.

Andrew Wiles

A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?For our freedom, said Davin.No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first.They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me.Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant...When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the A

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

Thich Nhat Hanh

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.

J. August Strindberg

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

George Santayana

When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.

William Shakespeare