"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
— Howard Zinn

"I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium... - but man as part of a movement or a crowd is ... inhuman... the only feelings I have are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.... Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile."
— Patrick O'Brian

"The poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others."
— Plutarch

"Those who profess to favour freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
— Frederick Douglass

"Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange."
— Virginia Woolf

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle."
— George Orwell

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Isn't it pretty to think so."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

"This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world."
— Stephen Hunt (The Court of the Air)

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad."
— George Gordon Byron

"Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made."
— Ambrose Bierce (The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary)

" The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast-- unaccountable headwinds by night-- and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. 'Try a piece of this, old cock,' he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. 'It might put a little heart into you.' The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.

Some minutes later he felt a touch upon his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying toward the door on its uneven legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink (its tongue was too short to lap). Sometimes it went to sleep in this position, bowed over the emptiness.

'In this bucket,' said Stephen, walking into the cabin, 'in this small half-bucket, now, I have the population of Dublin, London, and Paris combined: these animalculae-- what is the matter with the sloth?' It was curled on Jack's knee, breathing heavily: its bowl and Jack's glass stood empty on the table. Stephen picked it up, peered into its affable bleary face, shook it, and hung it upon its rope. It seized hold with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep.

Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, 'Jack, you have debauched my sloth.' "
— Patrick O'Brian

"...[That] is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, the rest of it was God’s will too, and that gentlemen is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn’t it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances...is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God."
— Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow)

"I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"
— Mark Twain

"I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.

The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother-'Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat."
— Geraldine Brooks (March)

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson