“prophecies do not alter fate, only confirm it.”

What harm is there in dreaming, if it eases pain? What good is reality, if it blots out hope? Can a man’s mind be washed without bleaching his soul?

to ask for anything of consequence from friends who cannot refuse is uncivilized.

Principles have a way of yielding to power.

The young see what they wish to see. The old see what they do not wish.

you must not use wood to put out the fire.

Like most Chinese, I am basically a fatalist – too sophisticated for religion and too superstitious to deny the gods.

If mortals wait until the gods remake the world to their liking to be happy, they are already in hell.

So that such ideas are opposed both to physical principles and to the authority of the Holy Writ which many time: confirms the stability of the Earth (as we shall discuss more fully elsewhere).

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing.

But in fact as Secretary of Homeland Security General John Kelly acknowledged at his confirmation hearing, walls and barriers alone are insufficient to insure security.

Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.

We know that the Russian’s interfered in our election and they did it to benefit President Trump. The intelligence agencies confirmed that.

We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.