“If only Paris and the Harpies had gotten along. But Promiscuity had taken one look at the beautiful women and deemed them “too much effort.”

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

http://web.archive.org/20090520151810/www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/features/interviews_profiles/e3i07c80a70350aca72e68eea8ffc6de060.

Sprüche und Widersprüche (Dicta and Contradictions) (1909); as translated by Richard Hanser

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)
Context: Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead.

The Covenant (1980) First lines

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)
Context: Over the past few decades, we've gotten into the bad habit of looking to the government to solve every personal and social crisis that comes along. People have really come to misunderstand government's scope. There's only so much it can do. For one thing, it's a terrible social regulator. And morals and values aren't things that legislation can even touch. You can't legislate morality. It doesn't work.

"Reflecting on ageing when she was approaching fifty" as quoted in: A Century of Women : The History of Women in Britain and the United States (1997) by Sheila Rowbotham, Viking, p. 475

Source: To the Lighthouse