Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Groan and forget it.

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

A big iron needle stitching the country together.

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.

If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.

The source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

A broken bone can heal but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

At fourteen you dont need sickness or death for tragedy.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

Pleasure in irony ... is an ego trip.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

As a nation we should commit ourselves not only to the fight against terrorism, but to economic justice, defeat of the AIDS epidemic and vestiges of discriminatory policies of all kinds.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Most people regard getting their way as a matter of simple justice.

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.

I immediately called the command center of the Department of Justice to let them know that my wife was on a plane that had been hijacked. I mainly wanted them know there was another hijacked plane out there.

When the Negro cries with pain from his deep hurt and lays his petition for elemental justice before the nation, he is calling upon the American people to kindle about that crucible of race relationships the fires of American faith.

Punishment is justice for the unjust.

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: "Thou shalt not ration justice."

The impression I have of Justice Warren is that he was looking for the just result in a case regardless of fixed dogma or principles and I like to think that I'm in that mold.

We've begun to get justice.