You can't prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but can prevent them from building their nest on it.

This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism--how intensely I despise them!

Agnes Allen's Law: Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.

The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good.

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

We must get beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much.

When my water-proof umbrella proved a sieve, sieve, sieve, When my shiny new umbrella proved a sieve.

While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.

Cowardice ... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

I tell people I'm too stupid to know what's impossible. I have ridiculously large dreams, and half the time they come true.

Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

A good conscience is a soft pillow.

I'd just as soon a beggar as king, And the reason I'll tell you for why; A king cannot swagger, not drink like a beggar, Nor be half so happy as I. . . . . Let the back and side go bare.

It is seldom that any liberty is lost all at once.

By them there sat the loving pelican, Whose young ones, poison'd by the serpent's sting, With her own blood to life again doth bring.

Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight? Who blushes at the name? When cowards mock the patriot's fate, Who hangs his head for shame?

Dirigo

Thou should'st be carolling thy Maker's praise, Poor bird! now fetter'd, and here set to draw, With graceless toil of beak and added claw, The meagre food that scarce thy want allays! And this--to gratify the gloating gaze Of fools, who value Nature not a straw, But know to prize the infraction of her law An hard perversion of her creatures' ways! Thee the wild woods await, in leaves attired, Where notes of liquid utterance should engage Thy bill, that now with pain scant forage earns. - Julian C.H. Fane,