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“The thing I fear most is fear.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“if you do one thing at a time, you can take a break from everything else.”
― Dushka Zapata, How to be ferociously happy and other essays

“The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.”
― John Buchan

“An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”
― John Buchan

“that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Cats tell me without effort all that there is to know.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Cats

“The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Cats

“Animals are inspirational. They don’t know how to lie. They are natural forces.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Cats

“Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, just look at the cats, you'll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Cats

“TV can make me ill in five minutes, but I can look at an animal for hours and find nothing but grace and glory, life as it should be.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Cats

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
― Maya Angelou

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”
― Maya Angelou

“The busier you are working on you, your life and your happiness, the less time you will have to dwell on another's success other than to celebrate it.”
― Dushka Zapata, How to be ferociously happy and other essays

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
― Thomas Paine

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
― Gore Vidal

“The problem with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished.”
― Nelson DeMille

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
― Gore Vidal

“Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”
― Gore Vidal, The Essential Gore Vidal

“The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”
― Gore Vidal

“We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
― Gore Vidal

“No good deed goes unpunished”
― Gore Vidal

“The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.”
― Gore Vidal, Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings

“Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. ”
― Gore Vidal

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.”
― Gore Vidal

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal... one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly.”
― Theophile Gautier

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms