"Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret."

-- Laurence J. Peter

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

--Horace Mann, founder of Antioch College

"You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!"

--Rod Serling

"Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

-- E.F. Schumacher

"I've been looking for that particular son of a bitch for seven years. I could have been a doctor, or an architect."

--Vivian Stanshall (Bad Blood)

"The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity. As a fresh start, she should give away all her endowments to the poor and needy. The clergy should live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945),
Letters and Papers from Prison

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

-- George Orwell

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."

-- Edith Sitwell

"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity."

-- Frank Leahy

"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life — except death itself — was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."

--David E. Davis, Jr., advertising writer and magazine publisher, recounting a nearly fatal auto racing accident at age 25 that left him disfigured.

"We have to repent of our blindness, our lukewarmness, and our disobedience, and turn back to the central truth of Christ as Lord and Saviour; an ethical system will not save us here, nor a timid sentimentalism, nor an excited emotional return, nor a dilettante mysticism.

We have to find that deep contrition which is the condition of His abiding.

Repentance is not a mere feeling of sorrow or contrition for an act of wrongdoing. The regret I feel when I act impatiently or speak crossly is not repentance... Repentance is contrition for what we are in our fundamental beings, that we are wrong in our deepest roots because our internal government is by Self and not by God.

And it is an activity of the whole person. Unless I will to be different, the mind will not follow.

True repentance brings an urge to be different, because of the sense of the incessant movement of what I am, forming, forming, forming what I shall be in the years to come."

-- Florence Allshorn (1887-1950)

"An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness."

"Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive."

"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."

"If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate."

"Life is just one damned thing after another."

"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."

"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."

"To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing."

--Elbert Hubbard, (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915)

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

--John Adams

‎"For some it was crazy, for others it was stupid, and others a day of courage and bravery. For me, it was a day to enjoy being on the bike."

--Carlos Sastre, on his ultimately futile attack on Stage 17 of the Tour de France

"Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord preferred to live with whores & sinners, seeing I go in for that myself."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Venetian Epigrams, as translated by Jerome Rothenberg

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

-- Barry Goldwater

"Whatever be our conception of the universe we must, it is obvious, start somehow; we must begin with something; and the something with which we begin, from the very fact that we do begin with it, must itself be without explanation, since, if something else were invoked to explain it, then the 'something else' must needs be logically prior to that which it is invoked to explain. Thus the 'something' being explained by a logically prior 'something else' could not have been ultimate."

-- C. E. M. Joad

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."

-- Andre Malraux
French author & resistance leader (1901 - 1976)

"When the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing of our own to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us fight—then we find out whether or not we live by faith."

-- Thomas Merton

"That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans."

-- C. S. Lewis (Surprised By Joy, 1955)