If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

Catherine Aird

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.

Muhammad Ali

How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?

Isabel Allende

We are what we repeatedly do.

Aristotle

For every prohibition you create you also create an underground.

Jello Biafra

It matters enormously what you think. If you think falsely, you will act mistakenly; if you think basely, your conduct will suit your thinking.

Annie Besant

Judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

Simon Bolivar

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

Gloria Borger

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Elizabeth Bowen

No fools, drunks or female scolds are allowed in the doctor's house when a patient is healing there. No bad news to be brought, and no talking across the bed. No grunting of pigs or barking of dogs outside.

ancient Irish Brehon law

It is better to be subject to the laws under one master, than to be subservient to many.

Catherine the Great

I leave it to posterity to judge impartially what I have done.

Catherine the Great

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.

Cato the Elder

Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.

Agatha Christie

I shall never be virtuous enough to be a saint, nor infamous enough to pretend to be one.

Queen Christina of Sweden

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Sir Winston Churchill

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.

Claud Cockburn

Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.

Confucius

In the hands of a bore, nothing is as dull as a fable; but in the hands of a master, it can be one of the wittiest and most charming commentaries on the human condition.

Diane di Prima

It has been women who have breathed gentleness and care into the hard progress of mankind.

Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen... and stupidity.

Harlan Ellison

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Benjamin Franklin

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.

Jodie Foster

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

Celia Green

No one ever understood disaster until it came.

Josephine Herbst

For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers.

Homer

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

Indian Proverb

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

W. R. Inge

I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered.

Jean Ingelow

Power is the ability not to have to please.

Elizabeth Janeway

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Thomas Jefferson

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.

Jewish Proverb

There are times not to flirt. When you're sick. When you're with children. When you're on the witness stand.

Joyce Jillson

Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them.

Lady Bird Johnson

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

Janis Joplin

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

Helen Keller

In reality there were no heroes or leaders.

Alexandra Kollontai

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

Ursula K. LeGuin

We've all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating people up.

Sugar Ray Leonard

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.

H.T. Leslie

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

Doris Lessing

There is no such thing as a perfect leader either in the past or present, in China or elsewhere. If there is one, he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant.

Liu Shao-ch'i

It is a common delusion that you can make things better by talking about them.

Dame Rose Macauley

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not only does he picture us caught in a tremendous man-made or God-made trap from which there is no escape, but we must also listen to him day in, day out, describe how the trap is inexorably closing. To such prophecies the human race, as presently bred and educated and situated, is incapable of listening.

Margaret Mead

Was there ever domination that did not appear natural to those who possess it?

John Stuart Mill

I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.

Michel de Montaigne

You have put me in here a cub, but I will come out roaring like a lion, and I will make all Hell howl.

Cary Nation, when being jailed

He who fights monsters should look into it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Neitzsche

The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

Larry Niven

We know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.

Henri Poincare

People who are always making allowances for themselves soon go bankrupt.

Mary Pettibone Poole

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.

Publilius Syrus

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Jeannette Rankin

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Rastafari

Do what you feel in your heart to be right --- for you'll be criticized anyway.

Eleanor Roosevelt

God made man, and then he said "I can do better than that" and made women.

Adela Rogers St. Johns

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.

Lord Salisbury

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

Seneca

Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.

William Shakespeare

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Susan Sontag

We have no objection to discuss the question of equality, for we feel that the weight of argument lies wholly with us, but we wish the question of equality kept distinct from the question of rights, for the proof of the one does not determine the truth of the other.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

By the protection of the law human rights are secured; withdraw that protection, and they are at the mercy of wicked rulers, or the clamor of an excited people.

US Supreme Court,
in ex part Milligan (1866)

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

James Thurber

All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

Lilly Tomlin

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

Barbara Tuchman

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Barbara Tuchman

If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.

Barbara Tuchman

No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The jay bird don't rob his own nest.

West Indian proverb

In any business, whether of government or mere merchandising, somebody must be trusted.

Woodrow Wilson

The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stone, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.

Zaki Yamani

The personal strengths and weaknesses of a leader are no true indication of the merits of his cause.

Roger Zelazny