"Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"We live as we dream--alone...."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"To philosophize is to learn how to die."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."
— Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

"The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it."
— Matthew Stover

"But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty."
— Michel Foucault

"laws are silent in times of war"
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. "
— Umberto Eco

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)