"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any."
— Wallace Stegner

"I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended"
— Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

"Women are like teabags; you never know how strong they are until they're put in hot water."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

"It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"I was born a heretic. I always distrusted people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."
— Susan B. Anthony

"Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
"
— Susan B. Anthony

"Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these."
— Susan B. Anthony

"I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.
"
— Susan B. Anthony

""Resistance to tyranny ius obedience to God""
— Susan B. Anthony

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

A people is only as great, as free, as lofty , as advanced as its women are free, noble and progressive."
— Susan B. Anthony

"“Santa Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year”"
— Victor Borge

"Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch
this declaration of the mastery
of God who, with magnificent irony,
granted me both the gift of books and the night."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire"
— Seneca "On the Shortness of Life"

"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. "
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, and we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realise that is has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it."
— Lucius Anneus Seneca

"When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger, the other opportunity."
— John F. Kennedy

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
— John F. Kennedy

"There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
— Robert F. Kennedy (Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years)

"The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened."
— John F. Kennedy

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”"
— Robert F. Kennedy

"There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all."
— Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

"...libraries should be open to all--except the censor."
— John F. Kennedy

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
— John F. Kennedy

"The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls."
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them."
— Parker Palmer

"Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car."
— Garrison Keillor

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
— Charles Bukowski

"I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them."
— Philip Pullman

"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion."
— Jon Stewart

"A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

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

"A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on."
— Carl Sandburg

"As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms."
— Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials)

"No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. "
— Betty Friedan

"I've never been able to figure out precisely what a feminist is. I know only this, people call me a feminist whenever I express any sentiment that differentiates me from a doormat."
— Rebecka West