Robert Orben

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.

Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral. 

There are only two kinds of people in this world. The realists and the dreamers. The realists know where they are going and the dreamers have already been there.

Remember the days when you let your child have some chocolate if he finished his cereal? Now, chocolate is one of the cereals.

Most people want to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.

Love is so confusing - you tell a girl she looks great and what's the first thing you do? Turn out the lights.

Older people shouldn't eat health food, they need all the preservatives they can get.

To err is human — and to blame it on a computer is even more so.

Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards.

Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He'd go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.

Dorothy Day

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it's right.

Osamu Dazai

This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.

I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.

Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”

People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

Kristin Hannah

As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her.

A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep into her bones. 

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours. 

Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

To make real friends you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down, but you can't let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again

That was what a best friend did: hold up a mirror and show you your heart.

Hannah Harrington

He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that's what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.

Hate is... It's too easy. Love. Love takes courage.

It's just nice, I guess. Knowing that someone else can put into words what I feel. That there are people who have been through things worse than I have, and they come out on the other side okay. Not only that, but they made some kind of twisted, fucked-up sense of the completely senseless. They made it mean something. These songs tell me I'm not alone. If you look at it at that way, music... music can see you through anything.

It's so stupid because all I wanted was space and now that I have it, there's this part of me that's achingly lonely I could die.

Whatever you decide, don't let it be because you don't think you have a choice.

Sometimes people think they want to know things, but then they hear the answer and realize they'd prefer to be in the dark.

If you really want things to change, you can make them change no matter where you are.

It's harder than you think, to find someone who truly believes in your unequivocal, unconditional awesomeness.

Ricky Gervais

Just because you're offended, doesn't mean you're right.

You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.

I see Atheists are fighting and killing each other again, over who doesn't believe in any God the most. Oh, no..wait.. that never happens.

The best advice I've ever received is, 'No one else knows what they're doing either.

A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.

It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.

The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.

Asaad Almohammad

You are there and to their ears, being a Syrian sounds like you’re unclean, shameful, indecent; it’s like you owe the world an apology for your very existence.

The blind faith in some half-assed conspiracy theories lines up with the logic of having to believe in something with no questions asked. It gives us peace and comfort. As simple as I was, I found that resorting to this absolute nonsense was the root of all our problems. It was a road of willingly-learned helplessness, for no action could make a difference, thereby no action was needed.

The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.

I am not an atheist preacher. I am not an absolutist or chauvinist whose ways are immune to evolution. My core philosophy is that I might be wrong.

As a citizen of the world, it’s my instinct to keep the fallen and the suffering in my thoughts. The human brain fascinates me; its limitless bounds of empathy. You see, in my mind there is logic to it: do no harm, prevent harm, help, support, care for the harmed, face the harmer. My stupid idealist conscience considers sympathy, not pity, at its worst, the most basic and the least negotiable civil duty. Of course as a citizen of the world, I should strive to do more. That said, I am only a man and so I often do the least.

Penn Jillette

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.

What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you say "I believe there's an all-powerful force of love in the universe that connects us all, and I have no evidence of that but I believe it in my heart," then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that Sharon Tate deserves to die. It's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that you need to fly planes into buildings for Allah.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Andrew Davidson

If you listen to the wind very carefully, you'll be able to hear me whisper my love for you.

You are mine, I am yours; you may be sure of this. You've been locked inside my heart, the key has been thrown away; within it, you must always stay.

Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love.

. . . but the truth is that I dislike most men as much as I dislike women. If anything, I am an equal opportunity misanthropist.

You'll swoop from incredible highs when you're just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you've accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent.

I understand that some people find God after misfortune, although this seems to me even more ridiculous than finding Him in good times. 'God smote me. He must love me.' It's like not wanting a romantic relationship until a member of the opposite sex punches you in the face. My 'miraculous survival' will not change my opinion that Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short, and paradoxically, far too long. 

Thomas Carlyle II

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.