Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?
Clarence Odbody, George Bailey’s guardian angel in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), directed by Frank Capra, written by Capra, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett to a story by Philip Van Doren Stern, and as portrayed by Henry Travers.
There can be no such thing as liberty where there is not rational reflection and choice.
William Graham Sumner, “Is Liberty a Lost Blessing?” Earth Hunger and Other Essays (1913).
Free government works well in proportion as government is superfluous.
George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).
Virtue is the health of the soul.
Ariston of Chios, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, fragment 359.
Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Declaration of Rights (1812).
One does not humanize carnage, one condemns it, because one humanizes oneself.