"There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place."

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“Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.”

“I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.”

“His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.”

“On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.”

“In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.”

“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.”

Resonant Thoughts

"'This is the place' is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to c…"

— Halldór Laxness

Literature1902–1998

#family

"The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what en…"

— Katherine Anne Porter

Literature1890–1980

#love

"There it is — in such patient silence — that we accumulate the inward power which we distribute and spend in action; that the soul acquires a greater and more vigorous being, and gathers up its collec…"

— Wayland Hoyt

Politics1838–1910

#life