Patrick Kavanagh It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities. Life is worth living. And then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked. John F. Kennedy The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth: persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Harper Lee As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it: whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning, an endeavour to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies. Joyce Carol Oates When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. John Kenneth Galbraith In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well. Nathaniel Hawthorne Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burdened too much with the past. Friedrich August Von Hayek There are no better terms available to describe [the] difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former "objective" and the latter "subjective." . . . While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the "facts" of the social sciences are also opinions; not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist. Rev. Al Sharpton I don't think Dr. [Martin Luther] King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I'm being effective, because I'm not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.