Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

~ Dr. Seuss

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a heaven that it shows itself cloddish. 

~ Evelyn Waugh, novelist (1903-1966) 

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made. 

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945) 

The law of work seems unfair, but nothing can change it; the more enjoyment you get out of your work, the more money you will make.

~ Mark Twain

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

~ William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616) 

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.

~ Doris Lessing, novelist, poet, playwright, Nobel laureate (1919-2013) 

Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals, the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great creative scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned if at all. 

~ Martin Gardner, mathematician and writer (1914-2010) 

Readers may be divided into four classes: 

1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 

2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 

3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 

4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also. 

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic (1772-1834) 

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

~ John Keats

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value. 

~ Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist (1915-2005) 

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. 

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900) 

To be nobody but myself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. 

~ E.E. Cummings, poet (1894-1962) 

Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way. 

~ Alice Childress, playwright, author, and actor (1916-1994)

Imagine there's no country, 

It isn't hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for,  And no religion, too. 

Imagine all the people 

Living life in peace. 

~ John Lennon, musician (1940-1980)

Someone once told me that 'time' is a predator that stalks us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because it will never come again.

~ Jean-Luc Picard

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money. 

~ Alanis Obomsawin, filmmaker (b. 1932) 

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. 

~  Gore Vidal, author (1925-2012)

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. 

~ Jimmy Carter, 39th US President, Nobel laureate (b. 1924) 

There is no more irritating fellow than the man who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or liberty, by quoting from Webster. 

~ Mortimer J. Adler, philosopher, educator, and author (1902-2001)