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One of the things I considered a delightful experience in school was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I didn’t realize the gap was so big from the Founding Fathers until now. And I didn’t realize they weren’t talking about me. —Maxine Waters
April 28, 2006
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience. —Harper Lee
April 27, 2006
No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy. —Herbert Spencer
April 26, 2006
We have two lives — the one we learn with and the life we live after that. —Bernard Malamud
April 25, 2006
We cannot … let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many “created equal” have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens. —William J. Brennan
April 24, 2006
Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early. —Anthony Trollope
April 23, 2006
There is a destiny that makes us brothers: / None goes his way alone: / All that we send into the lives of others / Comes back onto our own. —Edwin Markham
April 22, 2006
We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. —J. Robert Oppenheimer
April 21, 2006
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. —Charlotte Brontë
April 20, 2006
Just as the right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of a broader concept of individual freedom of mind, so also the individual’s freedom to choose his own creed is the counterpart of his right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority. —John Paul Stevens
April 19, 2006
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t that a big enough majority in any town? —Mark Twain
April 18, 2006
To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one’s piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them. —Victor Hugo
April 17, 2006
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. —Isak Dinesen
April 16, 2006
Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God. —Franklin D. Roosevelt
April 15, 2006
Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to lay a train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible! —Henry James
April 14, 2006
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist fears this is true. —James Branch Cabell
April 13, 2006
I speak for an art … weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. —Samuel Beckett
April 12, 2006
Sir, I would rather be right than be President. —Henry Clay
April 11, 2006
The greatest cunning is to have none at all. —Carl Sandburg
April 10, 2006
Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capitalism is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
April 9, 2006
The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute. —J. William Fulbright
April 8, 2006
The soul of Man must quicken to creation. / Out of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with stone, / Spring always new forms of life. —T.S. Eliot
April 7, 2006
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. —William Wordsworth
April 6, 2006
Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it. —Friedrich Nietzsche
April 5, 2006
The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog; not though in that stage of development he should puff and blow himself till he bursts with windy adulation at the heels of the laureled ox. —Algernon Charles Swinburne
April 4, 2006
Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny. —Marguerite Duras
April 3, 2006
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal — every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open — this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. —Washington Irving
April 2, 2006
Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door! —Emma Lazarus
April 1, 2006
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well. —Samuel Butler
