I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

In every human society, there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the height of power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery. The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort and to diffuse their influence universally and equally.

If someone were to say that life at hard labor is as painful as death and therefore equally cruel, I should reply that, taking all the unhappy moments of perpetual slavery together, it is perhaps even more painful, but these moments are spread out over a lifetime, and capital punishment exercises all its power in an instant.

No man can be judged a criminal until he is found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection until it has been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorize the punishment of a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt?

Laws are the terms by which independent and isolated men united to form a society, once they tired of living in a perpetual state of war where the enjoyment of liberty was rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrificed a portion of this liberty so that they could enjoy the remainder in security and peace.

If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.

A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.

When you call upon a Thoroughbred, he gives you all the speed, strength of heart and sinew in him. When you call on a jackass, he kicks.

We concentrate so much on anniversaries and birthdays that you forget it's the Tuesday that's tough that really counts. Sometimes she just needs some flowers or even just that ear. It's the little things that count. It's the regular days of the year that you have to keep your attention on her.

Living my life socially means there is a swagger to how I dress, walk; it's not about being 'cool,' it's just being me - that's understanding your place and your center - that's what swagger is, and I guess that's where the soul comes from.

As a man, if you're married, your happiness is with her happiness. If she's unhappy, everything's messed up. It's a woman's world for sure.

You can't be afraid to be honest and to be yourself. We all have imperfections and fall short at some point. Showing your human side creates a sensitivity, openness and trust. That's the beginning of the demise in a relationship - not being honest and not being you.

Passion without purpose is kind of pointless. I think God gives us the vision and wisdom to help enforce what he sees for us. You don't just sit at home and end up on 'Empire.'

My mom and my dad was the best example of unconditional love I could see as a kid. I've known it my whole life. Interactions, kissing, hugging - it definitely wasn't the fake love.

The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.

There are those who travel and those who are going somewhere. They are different and yet they are the same. The success has this over his rivals: He knows where he is going.

Social media websites are no longer performing an envisaged function of creating a positive communication link among friends, family and professionals. It is a veritable battleground, where insults fly from the human quiver, damaging lives, destroying self-esteem and a person's sense of self-worth.

You must stand for something! It does not have to be grand, but it must be a positive that brings light to someone else's darkness.

We all ran barefooted on the dusty roads in our past, but now the Emperor wears shoes, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the barefooted child and the doting mother are afforded a holistic environment to realise their dreams and ambitions.

Empowerment is not about doing the same thing the same way in the same environment. It's about building the man and the woman and doing so with a view to creating better citizens and, by extension, better patriots in this society of ours.

Happiness is making your dreams come true.

Inspiration comes from within yourself. One has to be positive. When you're positive, good things happen.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

Happiness does not come from football awards. It's terrible to correlate happiness with football. Happiness comes from a good job, being able to feed your wife and kids. I don't dream football, I dream the American dream - two cars in a garage, be a happy father.

I really love peace and quiet.

I quit because I didn't feel like the Detroit Lions had a chance to win. It just killed my enjoyment of the game.

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.

It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.