"One has very little influence upon one's children. Their characters are what they are and one can do nothing to change them."

“We are never really happy until we try to brighten the lives of others.”

Source : Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.26, American Foundation for the Blind

“I am not sure that you, the younger generations, will like to go to war that we went through. So, we learn as the mistakes are being committed.”

“So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.”

“Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.”

“Now that Hillary [Clinton] has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It's like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke.”

“I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.”

“What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?”

“One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”

Source : Ida B. Wells (2013). “Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells”, p.62, University of Chicago Press