"When giving money to the amputated, you must put it directly into their pockets."
— Greg Campbell (Blood Diamonds)

""How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.""
— Tracy Kidder

"We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So we fight the long defeat."
— Dr. Paul Farmer

"Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done."
— Tracy Kidder

"Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties."
— Jamie Whyte (Crimes Against Logic)

"The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them."
— Paul Hawken

"The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss. "
— Paul Hawken

"To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?"
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives..."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. THAT is their mystery and magic."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

""And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.""
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening"
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"Change is one thing. Acceptance is another."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"To love another person is to see the face of God."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"There is a determined though unseen bravery that defends itself foot by foot in the darkness against the fatal invasions of necessity and dishonesty. Noble and mysterious triumphs that no eye sees, and no fame rewards, and no flourish of triumph salutes. Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231)"
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so"
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction whence the shot came, and began to sing."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas."
— Victor Hugo

"Ah," cried Gavroche, "what does this mean? It rains again! ...If this continues, I withdraw my subscription."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"'Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Good actions are the invisible hinges on the doors of heaven."
— Victor Hugo

"The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Almost all the students who make it to Caltech, one of the best scientific universities in the world, come from public schools. So it can be done.
"
— Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century)

"Some would ask what country am I from? We ara supposed to tell the truth, [so] we tell them India. Some thought it was Indiana, not India! Some did not know where India is. I said the country next to Pakistan."
— Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century)

"The fact is, parents and schools and cultures can and do shape people. The most important influence in my life, outside of my family, was my high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. She pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students -- not simply how to write a lead or accurately transcribe a quote but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way. She was nearing sixty at the time I had her as my teacher and high school newspaper adviser in the late 1960s. She was the polar opposite of "cool," but we hung around her classroom like it was the malt shop and she was Wolfman Jack. None of us could have articulated it then, but it was because we enjoyed being harangued by her, disciplined by her, and taught by her. She was a woman of clarity and principles in an age of uncertainty. I sit up straight just thinking about her!
"
— Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century)

"What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life."
— Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America)

"Start with the end in mind. "
— Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

"Omit needless words."
— William Strunk Jr. (The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & How To Speak And Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin - Special Edition)

"Vigorous writing is concise."
— William Strunk Jr.

"Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work."
— Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated. "
— Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)

"Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)

"No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
— Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress)