Sourced and curated.

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

You only live once, that's the motto nigga YOLO

The Handmaid's Tale · 1985

★ 5.6

Hip hop

Drake

The Motto · 2011

★ 5.6

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

Surfacing · 1972

★ 5.5

Margaret Millar

1942

★ 5.2

Song · Pop music

Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.

Bruce Cockburn

Lovers in a Dangerous Time · 1984

★ 5.2

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Yann Martel

Life of Pi (novel) · 2001

★ 5.2

Speech · Political speech

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

John Philpot Curran

1816

★ 5.1

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.

Hugh Keough

1919

★ 5.1

Economic literature

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.

1977

★ 5.1

Sociology · Economic literature

Only the tiniest fraction of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them they are free.

The Affluent Society · 1958

★ 4.4

Irving Layton

1969

★ 4.3

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

The Handmaid's Tale · 1985

★ 3.9

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

They paved paradise And put up a parking lot, With a pink hotel, A boutique, and a swinging hot spot.

The Handmaid's Tale · 1985

★ 3.8

Song · Rock music

Joni Mitchell

Big Yellow Taxi · 1970

★ 3.7

Song · Folk · Pop

I wish I had a river I could skate away on I wish I had a river so long I would teach my feet to fly

Joni Mitchell

River · 1971

★ 3.7

Song · Folk music

There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Anthem · 1992

★ 3.7

Sociology · Economic literature

Leadership means making people feel good.

The Affluent Society · 1958

★ 3.6

Interview

Jean Chretien

1984

★ 3.6

Don't live the same year 75 times and call it a life.

Robin Sharma

2014

★ 3.6

Speech

A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot

1890

★ 3.5

Speech

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

William Osler

1902

★ 3.5

Scientific literature

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and beget.

William Osler

1904

★ 3.5

Look at that sea, girls-all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.

L.M. Montgomery

Anne of Green Gables · 1908

★ 3.5

Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.

The Favourite Game · 1963

★ 3.5

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

Economic literature · Philosophical literature

The Favourite Game · 1963

★ 3.5

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter

1969

★ 3.5

Interview

A truly exciting poem has something evasive or mysterious at the core, and it succeeds in suggesting to us that the core is essential to our being.

Mark Strand

1979

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.

Glenn Gould

1982

★ 3.5

Song · Folk music

Now, maybe there's a God above As for me all I've ever learned from love Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you But it's not a cry that you're hear tonight It's not some pilgrim who claims to have seen the light No, it's a cold and it's a very broken Hallelujah

Trickle-down theory—the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Hallelujah · 1984

★ 3.5

Essay

I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin.

1992

★ 3.5

Newspaper

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.

Observer · 1993

★ 3.5

Michael J. Fox

1997

★ 3.5

Newspaper

Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

Naomi Klein

2003

★ 3.5

Sociology

Believe it or not-and I know that most people do not-violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence.

Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined · 2011

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame so that they could see that it’s not where you’re going to find your sense of completion.

Jim Carrey

2014

★ 3.5

Poem

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.

John McCrae

In Flanders Fields · 1915

★ 3.5

Essay · Satire

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Stephen Leacock

1924

★ 3.5

Song · Folk rock · Folk music

Does any one know where the love of God goes When the waves turn the minutes to hours?

Gordon Lightfoot

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald · 1976

★ 2.8

Don't let the bastards grind you down.