Spending Oneself

Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

--Sarah Bernhardt

Scar Tissue

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

--Wallace Stegner

What Life Is

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

--Jack Lemmon

Waving Back

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around--and why his parents will always wave back.

--William D. Tammeus

Three Little Words

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

--Robert Frost

Even Witty

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

--Harold Pinter

So Startling

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

--Emily Dickinson

Your Friends

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

--Richard Bach

Taxing

Ask people if they want to be taxed, and they will always say no. Ask them if they are willing to be taxed in order to have roads, courts, health care, guaranteed education for their children through college, and a safe retirement, and the answer is different.

--Abigail Manheim

Nearest Perfection

The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Wise Despot

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

--Frank Herbert

This Is Nice

We should be kind to each other. Be civil. And appreciate the good moments by saying "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is!"

--Kurt Vonnegut

The Hoax

Americans today are great consumers of the hoax of a risk-free life.

--Philip Alcabes

Endlessly

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

--Henri Louis Bergson

Code Word

Anytime you see that "of faith" suffix as in "people of faith," it's a code word for "sex is dirty" or "women are dirty" or simply, "we can't control ourselves so you must not be able to either."

--BlondeSense Liz

Increase Turnout

If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.

--Coretta Scott King

What Citizens Do

Shopping is what consumers do. Talking to each other is what families should do, and talking about building a movement that improves life for all our families is what citizens must do.

--Bruce Dixon

Hard To Find

It is not skepticism about the very idea of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find.

--Kwame Anthony Appiah

Nothing Left To Chance

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

--Stephen King

Shall Make No Law

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

--Amendment I, the U.S. Constitution

Graver Issues

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.

--Janos Arany (poet, 1817-1882)

Ingratitude

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

--Rabindranath Tagore

The Exact Opposite

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.

--Bertrand Russell