Mark R. Levin

Where utopianism is advanced through gradualism rather than revolution, albeit steady and persistent as in democratic societies, it can deceive and disarm an unsuspecting population, which is largely content and passive. It is sold as reforming and improving the existing society's imperfections and weaknesses without imperiling its basic nature. Under these conditions, it is mostly ignored, dismissed, or tolerated by much of the citizenry and celebrated by some.

The Conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny. This is precisely why the Conservative reveres the Constitution and insists on adherence to it.

Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society's disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, 'the system,' and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked to the utopian cause. Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and acco

Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all.

Stacy Schiff

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

[Cleopatra's] power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar's murderers had noted, 'How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!' It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

Wes Moore

When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here.

The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.

I sat back, allowing Wes's words to sink in. Then I responded, "I guess it's hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.

Do you think that we're products of our environments? I think so, or maybe products of our expectations. Others' expectations of us or our expectations. I mean others' expectations that you take on as your own. I realize how difficult it is to seperate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.

Isabel Wilkerson

They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.

That's why I preach today. Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you're the one who pays for it.

The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.

Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege.

Now, we ain't got nothing to do with God's business," she says, sitting back in her seat. She adjusts herself and straightens her scarf, contenting herself with whatever the day has in store.

Iris Johansen

If your feet are firmly planted on the ground you'll never be able to dance.

They say anticipation makes pleasure more intense.

Silence & smile are two powerful tools. Smile is the way to solve many problems & Silence is the way to avoid many problems.

I can't be easy. It's not my nature. But it's my nature to love you.

They said no one knew a man as well as a woman who slept with him.

I'm only Superman, I'm not God.

We all die. I can't promise to live forever." His arms
tightened around her. "But I can promise to love you as long as I
live.

It's hard to know what's right when everyone thinks you're wrong.

You don’t give up on people because they’re not what you want them to be. Not if you love them.

Madeline Miller

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.

Thanhha Lai

Oh, my daughter,
at times you have to fight,
but preferably
not with your fists.

How can we scramble away like rats, without honor, without dignity, when everyone must help rebuild the country?

Paperwork, paperwork with a woman who pats my head while shaking her own. I step back, hating pity, having learned from Mother that the pity giver feels better, never the pity receiver.

Everyone knows the ship could sink, unable to hold the piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest. But no one is heartless enough to say stop because what if they had been stopped before their turn?

I hate being told I can't do something because I'm a girl.

Our lives
will twist and twist,
intermingling the old and the new
until it doesn't matter
which is which.

Mark Owen

There is no honor in sending men to die for something you won't even fight for yourself.

Don't just live, but live for a purpose bigger than yourself. Be an asset to your family, community, and country.

I learned there that the key was first to prioritize all the individual stressors and then act. I break it all down into the little things I can manage. The stressors that I can't affect, I don't worry about. The ones I can affect, I simply deal with one at a time.

Staying in my three-foot world became a mantra for me. It is liberating once you let go of the things you can't control. It seems to work for just about any situation.

The rule is, “When in doubt, load it out.” Of course the more you carry, the greater a toll it takes on your body, the slower you move, the harder it is to react quickly to a threat.

We were tools in their toolbox, and when things go well they promote it. They inflate their roles.

Jeff Kinney

I'll be famous one day, but for now I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons.

If there's one thing I learned from Rodrick, it's to set people's expectations real low so you end up surprising them by practically doing nothing at all.

You can't expect everyone to have the same dedication as you.

The best person I know is Myself.

Dear Aunt Loretta,
Thank you so much for the awesome pants!
How did you know I wanted that for Christmas?
I love the way the pants look on my legs!
All my friends will be so jealous that I have my very own pants.
Thank you for making this the best Christmas ever!
Sincerely, Greg

So if you want to find somebody to blame for the way i am, I guess you'd have to start with the public education system.

I didn't really know what to expect from detention but when I waked into the room, the first thought I had was, I don't belong in here with these future criminals.

See, when you're a little kid, nobody ever warns you that you've got an expiration date. One day you're hot stuff and the next day you're a dirt sandwich.

For the record, I think it should be illegal for a boy to have to fold his mother's underwear.

Daniel James Brown

It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.

It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can't waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I've just gotta take care of it myself.

All were merged into one smoothly working machine; they were, in fact, a poem of motion, a symphony of swinging blades.

It doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down,” he told his daughter, Marilynn. “What matters is how many times you get up.

The ability to yield, to bend, to give way, to accommodate, he said, was sometimes a source of strength in men as well as in wood, so long as it was helmed by inner resolve and by principle.

Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing.