The Sound It Makes

I recognize happiness by the sound it makes when it leaves.

--Jacques Prévert

Pro-Knife

I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

--Molly Ivins

Sometimes

Sometimes you don't know where you're supposed to be until you get there.

--Willie Randolph

Encourage More

Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize.

--Elizabeth Harrison

A Million

A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.

--Thomas Pynchon

Demand Progress

Hope doesn't demand progress; it demands justice, a conviction that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.

--Christopher Lasch

Promise Happiness

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.

--Emile Zola

Third Form

The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about.

--Martin E.P. Seligman

Only Time

Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.

--Art Buchwald

Cheerfully

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

--Blaise Pascal

Imaginary Beings

There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Strange Beast

If we were to judge the U.S. by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

--George Monbiot

Called to Speak

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Evil People

Evil people kill innocent life to achieve political objectives.

--George W. Bush (interview with Sean Hannity, Fox News, October 30, 2006)

Eternal

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

--Marshall McLuhan

The Cost of a Thing

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

--Henry David Thoreau

Prayer

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire.

--Mark Twain (The War Prayer)

Never Enough

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.

--Eric Hoffer

The Unforeseen

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

--Philip Roth

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him, and there will be no review or delay in carrying out the sentence.

--Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki

Friendship

I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma.

--Gerald R. Ford (2005 interview embargoed until his death)