Yevgeny Yevtushenko

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.

How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.

All values in this world are more or less questionable, but the most important thing in life is human kindness.

Jessamyn West

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

Roland Merullo

Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others.

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.

If Christ's message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.

Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of 
Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don't, they feel at home there or they don't. It's like the taste of cilantro.

Theodore Roosevelt II

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed

Believe you can and you're halfway there.

When you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

John Adams

1. The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
2. I read my eyes out and can't read half enough...the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.
3. Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
4. Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
5. A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
6. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know...Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.

Cherise Sinclair

1. It's hard for an educated woman to turn her head off. That's part of the joy of being a submissive. None of the decisions are yours. When you can't refuse anything and can't even move, those voices in your head go silent. All you can do, and all you are permitted to do, is feel.
2. Gabi to Marcus "I can't believe out of one hundred thousand sperm, you were the fastest!
3. Coffee and chocolate—the inventor of mocha should be sainted.
4. W hat you need and what you want aren't the same thing.
5. Right on the edge of fear was where trust could grow.
6. Feelings are feelings. They don't have dumb or smart labels.
7. Sex is a team sport, sugar.

Malala Yousafzai

We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.

One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.

When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful

Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow." Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.

I raise up my voice-not so I can shout but so that those without a voice can be heard...we cannot succeed when half of us are held back.

If one man can destroy everything, why can't one girl change it?

Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons.

The extremists are afraid of books and pens, the power of education frightens them. they are afraid of women

Once I had asked God for one or two extra inches in height, but instead he made me as tall as the sky, so high that I could not measure myself.

Aristophanes

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

Open your mind before your mouth.

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.

By words the mind is winged.

Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

High thoughts must have high language.

You possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.

It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls.

Under every stone lurks a politician.

Demagogues are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troublous times that you line your pockets.

Ashly Lorenzana

It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.

You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don't stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.

No one truly knows what they will do in a certain situation until they are actually in it. It's very easy to judge someone else's actions by what you assume your own would be, if you were in their shoes. But we only know what we THINK we would do, not what we WOULD do.

Heather Brewer

The worst pain in the world goes beyond the physical. Even further beyond any other emotional pain one can feel. It is the betrayal of a friend.

Whoever had decided that school should start so early in the morning and last all day long needed to be hunted down and forced to watch hours of educational televison without the aid of caffine.

Because teachers, no matter how kind, no matter how friendly, are sadistic and evil to the core.

It never gets easier, missing you. And sometimes I wonder if it ever will.

Mulling this over, Vlad wiped her lip gloss from his lips with the back of his hand. Vampires, after all, didn't sparkle.

The world is full of monsters with friendly faces.

Because pieces of your heart clearly weigh more when they're sitting shattered at the bottom of your stomach.