Hard Choices

If it's a hard decision, then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.
--Albert Bregman

Capitalism

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
--Bertrand Russell

Tolerant

Don't be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.
--Basil Baker

Sharing

Life is all about sharing moments with those you love. That sharing can involve being in the moment together. But quite often, it's about recounting it after the fact.
--Ryan McGee

Government

To say government must be small is nonsense. Government must be the size necessary to make a society and economy work, and that is not fixed--nor could it possibly have been known by farmers in the late 1700s.
--Jeff Madrick

Is

Love is or it ain't.
--Toni Morrison

Employees

Happy employees make good products.
--Chris King

Tenderness

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.
--Allan Gurganus

Free

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.
--Thomas Merton

Change

Governments care only as much as their citizens force them to care. Nothing changes unless we change.
--George Monbiot

Lukewarm

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Beginning

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
--Charles Darwin

Second Amendment

There are three honest interpretations of the Second Amendment, which makes no mention of guns or self-defense:
1. Private citizens can own the types of arms known to the writers of the Constitution in 1790, mostly slow-to-load muskets.
2. Private citizens can own any type of arm, including nuclear arms.
3. Government can make reasonable restrictions on what arms private citizens can own.
--RD

Civilized

I am civilized. My feelings are not.
--Jeanette Winterson

Chance

Perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
--Colum McCann

Once Were

What is it, he wonders,
that we had then and don't have now,
that we once were and are no longer.
--Jack Gilbert

Knowledge, Wisdom

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not using it in a fruit salad.
--Brian O'Driscoll

Prestige

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
--Paul Graham

Guilty

Our leaders now treat climate change as a guilty secret.
--George Monbiot

Work, Play

Most people have the ridiculous notion that anything they do which produces an income is work--and that anything they do outside "working" hours is play. There is no logic to that.
--William J. Reilly

Specific Person

Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self's own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
--Jonathan Franzen

A Part

I am a part of all that I have met.
--Alfred Lord Tennyson

Everything Changes

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.
--Shunryu Suzuki

New Year

It's a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave--let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we're faking them.
--Neil Gaiman

Caring People

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers--so many caring people in this world.
--Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers)

Humans

It was not simply a question of rescheduling a ritual, a party or a gathering; these celebrations, from all the faiths and from none, push back against the dominance of the long winter night. No one is more essential to them than humans between, say, ages 5 and 9, who are balanced between the world of reason and the world of magic.
--Jim Dwyer

Barbarism

Self-government and its institutions--public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries--are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.
--Charles P. Pierce

Amendments

When the Patriot Act was thumbing its nose at the First Amendment, we were told "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." And yet, when the Second Amendment is discussed, the Constitution is very much a suicide pact. The First Amendment is phrased as an absolute. We treat as conditional. The Second is phrased conditionally. We treat it as an absolute.
--Kurt Weldon

Reverence

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
--Garry Wills

Terrible Vastness

Apparitions and massacres both come out of nowhere, like dispatches from a world that's beyond our comprehension, their existence so momentous and irrational that they seem to demand from us items of sacrifice and tribute. It is dark now in Newtown, but they are still laying wreaths and flowers, just as they will for days and days, compelled to commemorate something they can hardly believe happened; to touch a terrible vastness they can't begin to understand.
--Justin Peters

Too Much

Too much information is almost always a turnoff. Note how "Foie Gras" sounds delightful, yet "Spreadable Ruptured Liver" does not.
--Carina Chocano

Right and Wrong

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?
--William Lloyd Garrison

None Of You

People who are not Syrian ask me the most painful question, "Why do your people kill each other?" I usually give long-winded explanations, gesturing with my hands but without eye contact, offering historical and logical precedents of tyranny and oppression and revolution and freedom. But I don't tell them what I should, not out of kindness, but out of pity and because it scares me to admit how hardened I've become over the last 20 months: Don't you dare, even for one second, believe that your people and your cities are immune to what happened to my country, my friend. None of you are.
--Amal Hanano

Intent

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Purpose

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
--Bertrand Russell

Undecided

They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.
--Winston Churchill

Heart

One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It's the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It's the first thing you hear when you're born--or before you're born--and it's the last thing you hear.
--Dave Brubeck

Rules

Following a list of rules, our hearts are not free to dance in response to another--we are only dully plodding along in an imitation waltz.
--Suzanne Clothier

Happen

What could have happened did happen.
--Dan Jenkins

Time

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us feeling terrified and alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time.
--Fiona Apple

Measure

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor: he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
--Mark Twain

Quiet

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
--Bertrand Russell

Help

Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.
It is the first great prayer.
--Anne Lamott

Discretion

Listen, all I can say is I was a lot more discreet as a candidate than I was in real life. Can I say that? Maybe it's indiscreet to talk about discretion.
--Elizabeth Warren

Lincoln

The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln. His example is universal and will last thousands of years. Washington was a typical American, Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world.
--Leo Tolstoy

Strange Pull

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.
 It will not lead you astray.
--Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Licking

Conservatives lost, and now they are just licking their wounds. Licking your wounds was, ironically, also part of their health care plan.
--Amanda Reckinwith

Virtue

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
--Oscar Wilde

Happiness

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
--Jack Gilbert

Poured

I am not a self-made man by any stretch of the imagination. There have been countless people that poured into me in a way that changed my life.
--R.A. Dickey

Broken

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
--Ernest Hemingway

Experience

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
--Fred Brooks

Comparisons

I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't do any good to compare disasters. The one that you live through is the one with the most impact. Period.
--Jeanette D.

Just Slowly Enough

Global warming happens just slowly enough that political systems have been able to ignore it. The distress signal is emitted at a frequency that scientists can hear quite clearly, but is seemingly just beyond the reach of most politicians.
--Bill McKibben

Latino

Mitt Romney actually endorsed Arizona's immigration policies. You can't fix this by flashing more pictures of brown people. This is not a "branding problem." This is a "problem problem." Latino voters didn't go crazy. Latino voters went voter.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Bullshit

I really hate bullshit. I hate it from other people, and I hate it from myself. The more bullshit there is in this world, the less clarity we have about the world around us. Bullshit is the clarity killer. It is the enemy of objectivity.
--Razib Khan

Government

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.
--John Adams

Communal

We vote because it is something we do together, for one another. We do not vote to take something back from someone else. We do not vote in a bubble, even if we think we do. Voting is communal, whether we want to look at it that way or not.
--Charles P. Pierce

Commonwealth

A commitment to being part of a self-governing political commonwealth is the only means of common protection we have left, and to deny that is to whistle your way past the true nature of the threat.
--Charles P. Pierce

Weather

We can't say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.
--Eric Pooley (senior vice president, Environmental Defense Fund)

Believer

God is where the opportunistic believer wants him to be.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Unite

Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.
--Thomas Jefferson (Inaugural Address, March 1801)

Good Religion

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
--G. K. Chesterton

Agnostic

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.
--H.L. Mencken

Concentration

Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.
--Arnold Palmer

An Election

Is an election--like the interstate highways, or the GI Bill--something we own in common, something we do together?
--Charles P. Pierce

Writing

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
--E. L. Doctorow

Smooth

Sometimes a smooth process heralds the approach of atrophy or death.
--Neil Young

Work

A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.
--Bertrand Russell

Evolution

Of course like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.
--Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D. (former president of Princeton University, during 1912 campaign for president)

All the Answers

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don't have all the answers, to think that they do.
--Bill Maher

Common Good

Strengthening the common good is a lot harder than protecting the comforts of a few.
--Yonce Shelton

New Technology

We shouldn't jump at a new technology simply because it has advantages; only time and study will reveal its disadvantages and show the value of what we've left behind.
--Justin B. Hollander

Giving

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
--George Eliot

Atheism

What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?
--Slavoj Zizek

1930s

Before now, I had never really understood how the 1930s could happen. Now I do. All one needs are fragile economies, a rigid monetary regime, intense debate over what must be done, widespread belief that suffering is good, myopic politicians, an inability to co-operate and failure to stay ahead of events.
--Martin Wolf

Mad Influx

In general, do those who routinely diagnose ADHD and prescribe drugs for it ever meditate on just how awfully strange our sensorium has become, and how rare it would be that we would perfectly adapt to this mad influx of swirling inputs?
--Cary Tennis

Inequality

Absolute freedom is impossible; humans are social animals, and society is a give-and-take. I'm not arguing for absolute egalitarianism, I'm saying that the fact that there will always be some level of inequality in a society does not prove that the current level of inequality is appropriate; it's a non sequitur.
--A Real New Yorker

Love, Fear

It used to be possible for me to gauge the depth of my love for someone by the intensity of the fear created in my contemplation of their death.
--Suzanne Clothier

Empathy

The thing Romney needs to do to beat Obama is show up in this debate and not have another empathy comment. Those comments are really hurting him far more than any 47% comments. The government's not here for empathy, it's here for the law. If we use empathy for everything we want to do, that's how countries go bankrupt and bad policy is created.
--Ryan Rhodes (Tea Party activist from Iowa)

Notice

This world is too bad. We must notice it.
--Bertrand Russell

Agenda

Environmentalists have always had an agenda to put nature above man. If they can find an end to their means, they don't care how it happens. If they can do it under the guise of global warming and climate change, they will do it.
--Donna Holt (leader of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a Tea Party affiliate)

Liberty

For the same reason, the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty.
--James Madison

Curse

I would trust politicians more if they would curse like normal human beings on occasion.
--Jon Valjon

Dogmatic

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation.
--George Romney (letter to Barry Goldwater, December 21, 1964)

Not You

One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That's not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you.
--Barack Obama

Each Other's Hands

The bloodiest and most difficult-to-forgive mistakes get made when we forget that we are all, whatever the role we choose in this particular transaction, in each other's hands.
--David Roth

Dimensions

Trying to hate Obamacare while taking pride in Romneycare is more than even a national politician can do without access to higher spatial dimensions.
--Stevens R. Miller

Time

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
--Bertrand Russell

Stole It

Now look, over there: That teacher/fireman/NFL referee has something you don't have! That person stole it from you. Go get 'em. We'll wait right here on our piles of money while you and him fight.
--Charles P. Pierce

Values

The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong.
--Michael Sandel

Blood

The only thing that seems to mobilize the Arab street is a movie, a cartoon or an insult, but not the pool of blood in Syria.
--Syrian activist on Twitter

Idiot

What he did was to say it worked in Massachusetts, but it can't work nationally. The problem he has is that's a totally illogical position, and he looks like an idiot.
--Jonathan Gruber (MIT economist who helped develop the health-care plan in that state)

Every Particle

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
--Jonathan Franzen

One Another

We must love one another or die.
--W.H. Auden ("September 1, 1939")

Liberty

Ignorance is the first threat to liberty. The second is to treat ourselves as economic units rather than as spiritual beings.
--Vartan Gregorian

Fairly

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
--Anonymous

Dreams

We are all saddened when we look at the world and see what few accomplishments we have made, compared to what we feel are the potentialities of human beings. People in the past, in the nightmare of their times, had dreams for the future.
--Richard Feynman (1964)

Imaginary

This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.
--Jamelle Bouie

Machines

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
--Bertrand Russell