No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.
- Eric Sevareid, journalist (1912-1992)
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
- Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
The man who dies rich dies disgraced.
- Andrew Carnegie, industrialist (1835-1919)

There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to -- if there are no doors or windows -- he walks through a wall.
- Bernard Malamud, novelist and short-story writer (1914-1986)

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890) 


The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled land with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
- Florence Luscomb, architect and suffragist (1887-1985)

Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer.
- Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

- Kahlil Gibran, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
- Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President (1809-1865)

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
- Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favours among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.
​- Norman Mailer, author (1923-2007)

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
- Madeleine L'Engle, writer (1918-2007)


Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
- Alan Alda, actor and director (b. 1936)

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life -- the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
- Hubert Horatio Humphrey, US Vice President (1911-1978)


In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.
- Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate (b. 1928)

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
- John Leonard, critic (1939-2008)
I am only one, / But still I am one. / I cannot do everything, / But still I can do something; / And because I cannot do everything, / I will not refuse to do the something that I can do
​ - Edward Everett Hale, author (1822-1909)