"The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read."

“Germany is determined to provide substantial help. So are the Netherlands and other states. But a day will come when we have to count on our own resources.”

“Safety's just danger, out of place.”

Source : Song: Honestly Now, Album: She, 1994

“They were jet, those wings, as deep as the sky, as black as Eoduin's hair—no, blacker, for they were dull, unoiled. They gave off no sheen in the light, no gleam to the eye. They drank up the light and diminished it: they were wings of pure shadow.”

“the writer must resist this temptation [to quote] and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.”

Source : Ethel Smyth (1922). “Streaks of life”

“Anyone who believes that men are the equal of women has never seen a man trying to wrap a Christmas present.”

“One cannot spend one's entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!”

Source : Reif Larsen (2010). “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet: A Novel”, p.220, Penguin

“Legacy leaders are the only ones wiling to pay the price to fix a broken culture.”

“I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.”

Source : "You can't hold back the human spirit". Interview with David Walsh, www.wsws.org. March 27, 1998.