Wisdom

Don’t answer every critic. Sometimes, the answers you give may be right but misconceived and misunderstood.

It ain't what people call you. It's what you answer to.

What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve about.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

Men are so conceited they’ll believe anything that flatters them.

Blame is the creed of the disempowered.

In a time when society is drowning in tsunamis of misinformation, it is possible to change the world for the better if we repeat the truth often and loud enough.

It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.

But no one ever said yes to make sex consensual. You took hints from body language, from the way two people came together. Why...Didn't a shake of the head or a hand pushing hard against a chest speak just as loudly? Why did you have to actually say the word no for it to be rape?

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, but sometimes it's hard not to get a jump on it yourself.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Are you in the habit of taking tea with anyone who approaches you in a foreign port?” He went on and snorted carelessly. “No wonder you were abducted so easily.

I don't underestimate audiences' intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.

Lord Derfel, you do insult a man so very easily. What was it to be? My head in a pit dunged by slaves? What a paltry imagination you do have. Mine, I fear, sometimes seems excessive, even to me.

There is no truth on this island of yours. Rather, there are as many truths as there are stars in the sky; and every one of them different.

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned or of dictionary-makers but is something arising out of the work needs ties joys affections tastes of long generations of humanity and has its bases broad and low close to the ground.

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

If being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like.

We were young, thoughtless - carried away with our own cleverness.

O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.