Napoléon Bonaparte

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Imagination governs the world.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.

History is written by the winners.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.

Caitlin Moran

We need to reclaim the word 'feminism'. We need the word 'feminism' back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42% of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? . . .

When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.

I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit.

What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.

Joseph Heller II

He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.

Insanity is contagious.

He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.

[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

Winston S. Churchill

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

If you are going through hell, keep going.

My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Never, never, never give in!

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Jon Stewart II

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

I've been to Canada, and I've always gotten the impression that I could take the country over in about two days.

Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe -- dare I dream it? -- maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.

If America leads a blessed life, then why did God put all of our oil under people who hate us?

Here’s how bizarre the war is that we’re in in Iraq, and we should have known this right from the get-go: When we first went into Iraq, Germany didn’t want to go. Germany. The Michael Jordan of war took a pass.

Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality.

Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.

Emilie Autumn

It gives me strength to have somebody to fight for; I can never fight for myself, but, for others, I can kill.

You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?

I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.

Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people's reaction to my trying to commit suicide.

I still own my heart, which I know because it hurts so much.

I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.

Studies show that intelligent girls are more depressed because they know the world.

Plato

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Mark Twain II

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Samuel Beckett II

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

My mistakes are my life.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.

Alberto Manguel

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."

"Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know."

"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."

"Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge."

"In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories."

"In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian."