It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.

People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold.

All progress is experimental.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.

Learning is not easy, but hard; culture is severe. The steps to Parnassus are steep and terribly arduous.

Attack another's rights and you destroy your own.

Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of a generous emotion.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Too much agreement kills the chat.

Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.

Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

Once I was gone for a month and I was just miserable, so I flew back from Florida for two hours just to be home and see my cats.

Success, in a generally accepted sense of the term, means the opportunity to experience and to realize to the maximum the forces that are within us.

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

I was two votes away from class clown in high school.

One can also be undignified and flattering toward a virtue.

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.

That was one of the reasons I took the role [of Mayor Amanda Rosewater in Defiance] - to be a part of something groundbreaking interested me.

I'm born to do music. I'm born to act. I'm born to dance and all of these things, and I will be respected.

It's not just an exclamation, but it's a rejection of everything to do with Christmas, with the spirit of Christmas, with gift-giving, with generosity.

You don't care if I'm guilty or not. You gonna make sure I go to jail for life.