Voltaire

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

It is better to walk alone, then with a crowd going in the wrong direction.

No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he’s chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.