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1860s, On Democratic Government (1864)
Context: But the election, along with its incidental and undesirable strife, has done good, too. It has demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election in the midst of a great civil war. Until now, it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility. It shows, also, how sound and strong we still are. It shows that even among the candidates of the same party, he who is most devoted to the Union and most opposed to treason can receive most of the people's votes. It shows, also, to the extent yet known, that we have more men now than we had when the war began. Gold is good in its place; but living, brave, and patriotic men are better than gold.

Rose, Blanche, and Violet (London: Smith, Elder, 1848) vol. 1, pp. viii-ix
Context: The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature. I know they cannot be divorced — that without intelligence we should be Brutes — but it is the tendency of our gaping, wondering dispositions to give pre-eminence to those faculties which most astonish us. Strength of character seldom, if ever, astonishes; goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice, are worth all the talents in the world.

Moonheart (1994), p. 386
Context: Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors. And this I will tell you as well: One cannot seek to uphold honor in a being that has none.

Source: The Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), p. 158
Context: Sadism is plainly connected with the need for self-assertion. At the same time it cannot be separated from the idea of defeat. A sadist is a man, who, in some sense, has his back to the wall. Nothing is further from sadism, for example, than the cheerful, optimistic mentality of a Shaw or Wells.

Letter to his brother Frank (14 October 1929), published in Robert Oppenheimer : Letters and Recollections (1995) edited by Alice Kimball Smith, p. 136
Context: Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

Source: The Devil is Dead (1971), Ch. 13
Context: Brannagan had been to more places than Finnegan had, including the same places. He had not only skirted the d'Entre-Casteau Islands, he had walked all over them. He had not only sailed through China Straits, he had dived in them for old wrecks. He had not only climbed the Cloudy Mountains, but had panned gold in their streams and dips.

Hugh Crane a.k.a. Cagliostro the Great, in Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy : The Trick Top Hat (1979)
Context: There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

As quoted in the article "Joshing Around" in Movieline magazine (November 1999)
Context: I'm unfettered by the world, which is a very unique place to be at my age. I'll have to eventually choose what these next few years will be about, but I'm not in a rush. Besides, my personal life is much more important to me than my professional life and my self-worth isn't based on whether or not I act. I love acting, but I'm also looking into the great wide-open at this as-yet unpainted mural that will be my life. Whether or not it involves the movie business I'm not sure. I'm much more interested in becoming a good man than in becoming a good actor.

About
Context: Herodotus is not more indisputably the father of history than is Sir Boyle Roche the father of Bulls. No doubt there were makers of bulls before his day, even as brave men lived before Agamemnon; but they are not remembered, and if their bulls have survived them they are credited to Sir Boyle by a posterity generously forgiving and forgetful of his famous indictment.

"Pink Collar: An Awfully Lonesome Affair" http://pinkcollar.typepad.com/tubbygirl/2007/04/an_awfully_lone.html in Hundreds and Thousands : The Journals of Emily Carr (2006)
Context: I wonder will death be much lonelier than life. Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You can live close against other people yet your lives never touch. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even coming and going.

Les opinions ont plus causé de maux sur ce petit globe que la peste et les tremblements de terre.
Letter to Élie Bertrand (5 January 1759)
Citas

Political Aphorisms, Moral and Philosophical Thoughts (1848)

Another Roadside Attraction (1971)

The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1952 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter VI, On Profits, p. 73

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 461.

Source: Leading Change, 1996, p. 10

"The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics," Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html (11 December 1965)