You can decide to be someone who brings people together, or you can fall prey to those who wish to divide us. You can be someone who educates yourself, or you can believe that being negative is clever and being cynical is fashionable. You have a choice.
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (American Head of State)
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
—Desmond Tutu (South African Clergyman)
Teachers should be held in the highest honor. They are the allies of legislators; they have agency in the prevention of crime; they aid in regulating the atmosphere, whose incessant action and pressure cause the life-blood to circulate, and to return pure and healthful to the heart of the nation.
—Lydia H. Sigourney (American Poetaster, Author)
Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.
—George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (British Statesman, Writer)
It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality.
—Harold S. Geneen (American Businessman)
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
—Milan Kundera (Czech Novelist)
The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.
—Alfred Adler (Austrian Psychiatrist)
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word—politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.
—Emma Thompson (British Actress, Screenwriter)
Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard.—It is in insignificant matters, and in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others, and denies nothing to itself.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher)
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.
—James Russell Lowell (American Poet, Critic)
The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth.
—Ananda Coomaraswamy (Indian Art Historian)
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare.
—Yoshida Kenko (Japanese Poet)