Rebel

Every act of rebelling expresses a nostalgia for innocence.
- Albert Camus, 1913 - 1960

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.
- Clarence Seward Darrow, 1857 - 1938

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subject are rebels from principle.
- Edmund Burke, 1728 - 1797

Academia forcibly tells you about all the great men and revolutionaries, and rebels, especially the rebels, who have changed the world for the better. But they wouldn't notice him were he standing right in front of them.
- Eli Khamorov

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
- Thomas Jefferson, 1743 - 1826

Sacrifice

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
- Charles du Bois

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.
- John Foster Dulles, 1888 - 1959

The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869 - 1948

Virtue does not always demand a heavy sacrifice, only the willingness to make it when necessary.
- Frederick Sherwood Dunn, 1893 - 1962

Beware of sentimental alliances where the consciousness of good deeds is the only compensation for noble sacrifices.
- Otto von Bismarck, 1815 - 1898

For you to be successful, sacrifices must be made. It's better that they are made by others but failing that, you'll have to make them yourself.
- Rita Mae Brown

Nations

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
- David Friedman

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.
- Paul Ambroise Valéry, 1871 - 1945

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
- Herbert V. Prochnow, 1897 - 1998

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
- Arthur C. Clarke

Copies

The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals.
- François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 1613 - 1680

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
- Pablo Picasso, 1881 - 1973

Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.
- Pierre Auguste Renoir, 1841 - 1919

In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.
- Alice Foote MacDougall, 1867 - 1945

After two hundred years most of the outlandish and monstrous ideas of [Shakespeare] have acquired the right to be considered sublime, and almost all modern authors have copied him.... It does not occur to people that they should not copy him, and the lack of success of their copies simply makes people think that he is inimitable.
- Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 1694 - 1778

Ursula K. Le Guin

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty, not knowing what comes next.

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
- All from Ursula K. Le Guin

About: Ursula Kroeber was born at Berkeley, California on 21Oct in 1929. She earned her BA at Radcliffe College in 1951 and her Masters at Columbia the next year. While most of her writing features bizarre aliens in distinctly alien environments, she is a model of personal stability - she married Charles Le Guin in 1951 and they are still together, in fact they've lived in the same house in Portland, Oregon since 1958. She has written seventeen novels, eleven children's books, more than 100 short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, apparently unaffected by the rejection notice from Astounding Science Fiction for her first story - at age eleven.

Assorted Collection

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's Relativity.
-Albert Einstein

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
- Robert Frost

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.
- Franklin P. Jones

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
-Jean Cocturan

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world everyday always just exactly fits the newspaper.
- Jerry Seinfeld

It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.
- Darrin Weinberg

Life is pleasant.
Death is peaceful.
It's the transition that's troublesome."

Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.

Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.

It is not exactly cheating, I prefer to consider it creative problem solving.

Whoever said money can't buy happiness, didn't know where to shop.

Alcohol doesn't solve any problems, but then again, neither does milk.

Most people are only alive because it is illegal to shoot them.

Forgive your enemies but remember their names.

The number of people watching you is directly proportional to the stupidity of your action.

Dont worry that the world ends today, its already tomorrow in Australia.

U learn in life when u lose

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
-Albert Einstein

Return

The man who is cocksure that he has arrived is ready for the return journey.
- B.C. Forbes, 1880 - 1954

Don't ever slam a door; you might want to go back.
- Don Herold, 1889 - 1966

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
- Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
- Robertson Davies

Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.
- Bill Cosby

Le Carre

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters.

Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

The disciplines of storytelling require that I shape, out of the monotony and everyday life of espionage, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's already contrary to the reality.
- All from John le Carré

About: David Cornwell was born at Poole, Dorset, England on Oct19 in 1931. His father was engaged in swindles and spent time in prison for fraud, his mother left when David was five. Disliking the local school, he convinced his father to send him to Switzerland. He spent a couple of years at Berne University, then served in the Austrian army before returning to England. Attracted to espionage as a career, he studied modern languages at Lincoln College, Oxford before he joined the Foreign Service and was posted to Germany. The infamous double agent Kim Philby blew his cover, and Cornwell started writing spy novels based on his experience under the name John le Carré. These quotes deal with spies, writers, and the parallels between the two trades.

Choice

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.
- Arnold Joseph Toynbee, 1889 - 1975

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
- Ayn Rand, 1905 - 1982

Life is the acceptance of responsibilities or their evasion, it is a business of meeting obligations or avoiding them. To every man the choice is continually being offered, and by the manner of his choosing you may fairly measure him.
- Ben Ames Williams

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
- Thomas Merton, 1915 - 1968

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

Arthur Miller

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write ... were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
- All from Arthur Miller, 1915 - 2005

About: Arthur Asher Miller was born at New York City on this day in 1915. He attended public school in Harlem, his applications to Cornell and the University of Michigan were declined. He read extensively and saved most of his earnings for five years and was then accepted at Michigan where he earned his BA in English in 1938 and was later given an honorary doctorate. He wrote his first play in his sophomore year, motivated by a $250 contest prize. His 1949 play Death of a Salesman won a Pulitzer, three Tony Awards, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the first play to win all three. During the Red Scare of the fifties he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blackballed in Hollywood. Miller continued to write until his final illness, his 25th play, Finishing the Picture, was released in 2004.

Virgil

As the twig is bent the tree inclines.

Death plucks my ears and says, "Live - I am coming."

They can because they think they can.

We are not all capable of everything.
- All from Virgil, 70 - 19 BC

About: The poet and storyteller Publius Vergilius Maro was born on this day in 70 BC at Andes, a village near Mantua, Italy. His father could afford an extensive education for the man we know simply as Virgil. Most of his writing career was spent on rustic poetry, but after Octavian came to power he pressured Virgil to write the Aeneid, the complete epic of Roman history. As Homer was the greatest of the Greek poets, Virgil was the greatest Roman poet and covered much of the same material.

Illness

Every body's heart is open, you know, when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessings of health.
- Jane Austen, 1775 - 1817

I hereby confess
That of all I possess
I'd most gladly be minus
The sinus.
- Felicia Lamport

The sad truth is that there is no point to getting sick when you're a grown-up. You know why? It's because being sick is about you and your mother.... Without that solicitous hand on your forehead, there is no one to confirm that you are really sick.
- Adair Lara

Marriage

A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.
- Andre Maurois, pseudonym of Émile Herzog, 1885 - 1967

A successful marriage is not a gift; it is an achievement.
- Ann Landers, 1918 - 2002

Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.
- Barnett Brickner

Story writers say that love is concerned only with young people, and the excitement and glamour of romance end at the altar. How blind they are. The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.
- Irving Stone

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
- Simone Signoret

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
- Rita Rudner

Unrequited Love

A mighty pain to love it is,
and 'tis a pain that pain to miss;
but of all the pains,
the greatest pain
is to love, but love in vain.
- Abraham Crowley

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
- George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950

Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.
- James Matthew Barrie, 1860 - 1937

Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest:
Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers:
Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!
- William S. Gilbert, 1836 - 1911

Luck

When you work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, you get lucky.
- Armand Hammer, 1898 - 1990

It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck, even while waiting for it.
- Baltasar Gracian, 1601 - 1656

I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.
- Brian Tracy

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
- Jean Cocteau, 1889 - 1963

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882 - 1945

Charlton Heston

The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business.

An epic is the easiest kind of picture to make badly.

You can spend a lifetime, and, if you're honest with yourself, never once was your work perfect.
- Charlton Heston

About: John Charles Carter was born at Evanston, Illinois on this day in 1923. After his mother remarried he took his stepfathers surname, and somewhere along the line he took his mother's maiden name as his first name, thus Charlton Heston. Success in the drama program in high school earned him a scholarship to Northwestern University. After serving in the US Army Air Force he moved to New York City and married, working as a model before playing Broadway in 1947. He moved to Hollywood in 1950 and became a major star with the 1956 epic The Ten Commandments. He was an early and visible participant in the civil rights movement of the sixties, more recently he served as president of the National Rifle Association.

Gore Vidal

Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.

Those who have not undergone minor disasters are being held in reserve for something major.
- All from Gore Vidal

About: Eugene Luther Vidal was born at West Point, New York on this day in 1925, his father was an aeronautics instructor at the military academy. His maternal grandfather, Thomas P. Gore (whose name Vidal would later assume) was a senator from Oklahoma. Senator Gore was blind, so young Vidal often read aloud for him and sometimes acted as a guide, giving him early exposure to the workings of power. A skilled wordsmith, anybody would enjoy his historical novels, he has scandalized and alienated a wide range of America's elite with his unconventional thinking and wicked aphorisms.

Gandhi

It is a mystery to me how a person can feel honored by the humiliation of his fellow human beings.

A man is but a product of his thoughts; what he thinks, that he becomes.

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.

It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.

Truth never damages a cause that is just.
- All from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869 - 1948

About: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born at Porbandar, Kathiawad, India in 1869. From his early career in law to his assassination while preparing to pray in 1948 the Mahatma (Sanskrit for "great soul") preached nonviolence, and to the surprise and consternation of the South African and colonial Indian governments he changed his world. He is India's 'Father of the Nation'.

Old Age

Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.
- Alfred Victor Vigny, 1797 - 1863

Youth, large, lusty, loving. Youth, full of grace, force, fascination. Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
- Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, 1855 - 1934