What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.

There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

A poem should not mean but be.

we're just paper on a shelf, in the end

You gotta fight for your right to vote!

Very often the lessons you learn are more important than the things you accomplish

The Enron scandal calls into question the integrity of the entire capitalist system, which previously we assumed was based on honest, straightforward greed.

We're living in post-nuance online times.

It's my opinion that if you're trying to tell a realistic story that centers around realistic characters, you can't help but touch on important issues. Those issues are what make us human.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

The most important job you will ever have is your commitment to a promise you made to someone.

I am not good at aligning myself with any movement that comes along but also I don't like the thought of sitting back and doing nothing.

The word processor is a better tool than a quill pen because you can do so much more with it, but on the other hand, what you have to say and how you say it is the ultimate determination.