Somebody Said It Better

"Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense."

"Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: to teach with creativity and passion, to stop teaching to the test, and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn."

"In a perfect world, individuals would be free to take all the heroin they wanted – and stuff their faces with trans fats as much as they like – until it becomes a problem for their neighbors. Which it clearly has."

"I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity - not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a color - but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good."

"I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able – if called upon to do so – to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world."

"I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal."

"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."

"I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. -How much do you love me?- And -Who’s in charge?-’ Everything else is somehow manageable."

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end."

"‘The past is the past,’ Harry goes on, ‘you got to live in the present. … It’s the only way to think. When you’re my age, you’ll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you’ve seen on your back you’d never get up in the morning.’"

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."