Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

- Roger Zelazny

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy.  But the Bible says to love your enemy 

- Frank Sinatra

Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”


- Shel Silverstein.

When you do things right people won't be sure you've done anything at all

-God (Futurama)

Pity the meek for they shall inherit the world 

- Don Marquis

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother 

- Voltaire

Religion is to spirituality what porn is to sex 

- Grant Morrison

Anything or anyone that doesn’t bring you alive is too small for you. 

- David Whyte

As a nation we may take pride in the fact that we are soft-hearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed
 
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

It’s later than you think 

- Evan Mandery

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others. 

- Tyron Edwards

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new

- e. e. cummings

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see

-Henry David Thoreau

"I must do something.” always solves more problems than “Something must be done.” 

- Terry Kurtzer

Peace comes from within.  
Do not seek it without.
 
-Buddha

In 20 years you will be more disappointed by what you didn’t do than by what you did 

- Mark Twain

The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away 

- Joy J. Golliver

He who is greedy is always in want. 

~Horace

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

- H. L. Mencken

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost. 

- Dalai Lama

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. 

- Confucius

Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence

-Anonymous

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

- Lou Holtz

Camping is not fun. It’s just something poor people do for vacations.

  - Daniel Tosh.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

- Voltaire

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’ – is our national disease.”

- William James

Activism is my rent for living on the planet.
 
- Alice Walker

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. 

- Aristotle

They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.

 - Howard Zinn

If a man has an apartment stacked floor to ceiling with newspapers, we call him crazy.  If a woman has a trailer house full of cats, we call her nuts.  But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish an entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune Magazine and pretend that they are role models  

- B. Lester

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
 
― Howard Zinn

Freedom isn’t free. It shouldn’t be a bragging point that “Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,” as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers The government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn’t insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.

- Bill Maher

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them 

- Ray Bradbury

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

 -Alfred North Whitehead

When I was five years old my mom always told me happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote “happy,” they told me I didn’t understand the assignment, I told them they didn’t understand life 

- John Lennon

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and live by what they have.  Such people become crazy...or they become legend 

- Jim Harrison

Reputation is what others know about you.  Honor is what you know about yourself 

- Lois McMaster Bujold

The most dangerous phrase in our language is “we’ve always done it this way” 

-Grace Hopper

A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk forward 

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought.  The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgement on anything new.

 - Galileo Galilei

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages 

- William H. Maudlin

Work it like a Chinese Gymnast, wear something tight, force a smile and lie about your age.  

- Tina Fey

Do you know how it feels to hate the person you love most in the world, and all you can do to ease the pain is get smacked?

-Chuck Palahniuk

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. 

-Jules (Pulp Fiction Ezekiel 25:17)

After all is said and done, more is said than done. 

- Aesop

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
 
-Dr. Seauss

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.” 

- Joseph Pulitzer

Nice guys finish last but we get to sleep in 

-Evan Davis

If there was any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others we could have paradise in a few years 

- Bertrand Russell

I used to think the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.  Then I realized who was telling me
 
- Emo Phillips

I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting 

- Amelia Earhardt

Martyrdom...is the only way in which man can become famous without ability 


- George Bernard Shaw



*obviously this pre-dates reality TV*

It’s not the size of the Bible but the motion of the devotion.

“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching,” attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
 
- G. K. Chesterton

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
 
- Niels Bohr

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” 

- John Steinbeck

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

 - Thich Nhat Hanh

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
 
- Robert Heinlein

No one falls in love by choice.  It is by chance
No one stays in love by chance.  It is by work
No one falls out of love by chance.  It is by choice

There is no pain without, at it’s end, an echo of joy

Now is the Autumn of our ennui

I’m just an invisible monster, incapable of being loved by anyone

 - Chuck Palahniuk

At night, your beloved wanders.  Do not accept consolations

 - Rumi

One umbrella –
the person more in love
gets wet
 
– Keisanjin

“Love is friendship, set on fire.”

 - Jeremy Taylor

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” 

- Robert Heinlein

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”

 -Aristotle

''Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.'' 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Come live in my heart, and pay no rent.  

- Samuel Lover

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."

 - Neil Gaiman

To Love is to commune with another person and to discover in him or her a Divine Spark. 

- Paulo Coelho

Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope or fear 

- Francais de le Rochefauld

Love each other stubbornly and be stubborn about nothing else 

- Sam Reich

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.  The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear 

- Nelson Mandela

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech
 
- W. Somerset Maughnam

Rule 17: Don’t turn your back on bears, men you have wronged, or the dominant Turkey during mating season
 
- Dwight Shrute

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college 

- PJ O’Rourke

Delicious Bourbon
Finest of all the spirits
a drunken haiku
 
- Jeph Jacques

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink in the wild air 

- Ralph Waldo Emmerson

When the politician complains that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there and TV merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained
 
-Edward R. Murrow

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it. 

- Groucho Marx

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations 

- Walter Bagehot

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen. 

- John Steinbeck

The longer you wait for the future, the shorter it will be

“A long time ago, today was the future.” 

- The Big Book Of The Future

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.

 - Indira Gandhi

You can pray for someone even if you don't think God exists.

It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live. 

 - Alexander Dumas

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you  

- William James

“The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.”

 - Victor Hugo

Real eyes
Realize
Real lies

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
 
-  Henry David Thoreau

If you go home with someone and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them - John Waters

What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul - Jesus

I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. - Hugh Laurie

We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.  ~ Louis D. Brandeis

We are all a little weird, and life’s a little weird.  When we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours we join up with them in mutual weirdness and call it love 

- Dr. Seuss

Don’t say another Goddamn word.  Up until now, I’ve been polite. If you say anything else, one word, I will kill myself.  And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place.  From my black throne I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you.  This fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.  When it begins you will hear the sound of children screaming – as though from a great distance.  A smoking orb of nothing will form above your bed.  From this morbid chasm will emerge a thousand starving crows.  As I slip through the widening maw in my new form you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated.  Then as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face I will open my six mouths and I will sing the song that ends the Earth.
 
- Penny Arcade

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail 

- Abraham Maslow

The fruits of life fall into the hands of those who climb the tree and pick them.
 
-  Earl Tupper

The supreme arrogance of religious thinking: that a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a spec of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star … would look up at the sky and declare, ‘It was all made so that I could exist!

 - Peter Walker

 The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
 
- George Bernard Shaw

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children…to leave the world a better place…to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We need anything politically important rationed out like Pez: small, sweet, and coming out of a funny, plastic head."

 - Dennis Miller

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life." 
- Immanuel Kant

“To the privileged, equal treatment feels like discrimination.”  

- Adam Serwer

“For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’” 

- John Greenleaf Whittier

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
 
- Bertrand Russell

“Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won you earn it and win it in every generation.” 

 - Coretta Scott King

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body... That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.”
 
- Louis de Bernières

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”  

- Buddha

“To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy, not respectable and wealthy, not rich. To listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart. To study hard, to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common — this is my symphony.”  

 - William Ellery Channing

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” 

 - Plato

Saying sorry doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Sometimes, it means that you’re just tired explaining yourself.
 
- Isabelle Dagmang

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.- Michael Crichton

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
- H. L. Mencken

When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it: always. - Mahatma Gandhi

“Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves? - Yevgeny Yevtushenko”

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross
-Sinclair Lewis

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. ~ Robert M. Hutchins

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage.
Sir Alex Fraser Tyler

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. ~ Edward R. Murrow

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them. ~ Mark Twain

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. 

~ William E. Gladstone

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. - Epictetus

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination - Mark Twain

If you’re not happy with what you have, what makes you think you’ll be happy with more?