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	When I examined my political faith I found that my strongest belief was in democracy according to my own definition. Democracythe essential thing as distinguished from this or that democratic governmentwas primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament, and not an economic structure or a political machine. The testament involved certain basic beliefsthat the personality was sacrosanct, which was the meaning of liberty; that policy should be settled by free discussion; that normally a minority should be ready to yield to a majority, which in turn should respect a minoritys sacred things. It seemed to me that democracy had been in the past too narrowly defined and had been identified illogically with some particular economic or political system such as laissez-faire or British parliamentarism. I could imagine a democracy which economically was largely socialist and which had not our constitutional pattern. -John Buchan

	Without belittling the courage with which men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men have lived. The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. A man does what he mustin spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressuresand that is the basis of all human morality. In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his consciencethe loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow meneach man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredientthey can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul. -John Fitzgerald Kennedy

	The President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power in the Federal Constitution or in an act of Congress passed in pursuance thereof. There is no undefined residuum of power which he can exercise because it seems to him to be in the public interest. -William Howard Taft

Age
	Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary. -Marcus Tullius Cicero

Alcohol/Alcoholism
	An alcoholic has been lightly defined as a man who drinks more than his own doctor. -Alvan L. Barach

America
	The American Dream is one of the greatest ideas in the history of human achievement . . . It thrives today in an age when its core components of freedom and opportunity are open to more Americans than ever before. It holds a real, identifiable place in the American heart and mind, and it informs the aspirations of everyone from farmers to software developers, from detectives to bankers, from soldiers to social workers . . . It defines us as a people, even as we add to its meaning with each new chapter in our national experience and our individual actions. -Dan Rather

Anger
	Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others. . . .If, however, we do not use our anger to define ourselves clearly in every important relationship we are in--and manage our feelings as they arise--no one else will assume this responsibility for us. -Harriet Goldhor Lerner, The Dance of Anger

Art
	Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist. -Edgar Allan Poe

	Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One -Oscar Wilde

Authors & Writing
	To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies. -Willa Cather

	The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. -E. M. Forster

	Style may defined as the proper words in the proper places. -Jonathan Swift

Beauty
	Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man -- the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Belief
	As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true. -Michel De Certeau

	To a very large extent men and women are a product of how they define themselves. As a result of a combination of innate ideas and the intimate influences of the culture and environment we grow up in, we come to have beliefs about the nature of being human. These beliefs penetrate to a very deep level of our psychosomatic systems, our minds and brains, our nervous systems, our endocrine systems, and even our blood and sinews. We act, speak, and think according to these deeply held beliefs and belief systems. -Jeremy W. Hayward

Business
	Business, that's easily defined; it's other people's money. -Alexander Dumas

Character
	I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!. -William James

	The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves. -Leon Trotsky

Communism
	We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs. -Salman Rushdie

Control
	Any man who selects a goal in life which can be fully achieved has already defined his own limitations. -Cavett Robert

Conversation
	Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation? -Maupassant

	We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes. -Konstantin Stanislavisky

Crime
	The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence. In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects Americanism itself. -Robert Warshow

Democracy
	What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority. -Walter Lippmann

	A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. -Norman Mailer

Differences
	More than 20 years ago, President Kennedy defined an approach that is as valid today as when he announced it. So let us not be blind to our differences,'' he said, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved.''Well, those differences are differences in governmental structure and philosophy. The common interests have to do with the things of everyday life for people everywhere. Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, oh, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living?Before they parted company, they would probably have touched on ambitions and hobbies and what they wanted for their children and problems of making ends meet. And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would be saying to Ivan, Wasn't she nice? She also teaches music.'' Or Jim would be telling Sally what Ivan did or didn't like about his boss. They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people don't make wars.People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war. They want to have some of the good things over and above bare subsistence that make life worth living. They want to work at some craft, trade, or profession that gives them satisfaction and a sense of worth. Their common interests cross all borders. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.htm -Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States-Soviet Relations, January 16, 1984

Enemy, Enemies
	I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me. -Clare Boothe Luce

Engineer, Engineering
	To define it rudely but not ineptly, engineering is the art of doing for 10 shillings what any fool can do for a pound -Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley

Enlightenment, The
	If I could define enlightenment briefly I would say it is the quiet acceptance of what is. -Wayne Dyer

Ethics
	The truth is that good ethics sometimes is good business, but sometimes it's not. It depends on one's goals and how one defines good business. Sometimes, good ethics can end in bankruptcy. Of course, so can bad ethics. A fairer statement is that good ethics can be a very powerful business asset and that good things tend to happen to companies and individuals that consistently do the right thing and bad things tend to happen to those that even occasionally do the wrong thing. But the crucial point is that the moral obligation to live according to ethical principles is not dependent on whether it's advantageous. People of character do the right thing in the pursuit of virtue, not self-interest. http://www.josephsoninstitute.org/business-ethics_commentaries.html -Michael Josephson

Example
	You have to set the tone and the pace, define objectives and strategies, demonstrate through personal example what you expect from others. -Stanley C. Gault

Faith
	Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. -H. L. Mencken

Fanaticism
	Fanaticism soberly defined, is the false fire of an over heated mind. -William Cowper

	Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt. -Aldous Huxley

Fascism
	Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. -Jean-Paul Sartre

Forgiveness
	Many people hold onto a grudge because it offers the illusion of power and a perverse feeling of security. But in fact, we are held hostage by our anger. It is never too late to forgive. But you can forgive too soon. I am especially wary of what I call saintly forgiveness. Premature forgiveness is common among people who avoid conflict. They're afraid of their own anger and the anger of others. But their forgiveness is false. Their anger goes underground. I define forgiving as letting someone back into your heart. This returns us to a loving state -- and not merely within the relationship -- we feel good about ourselves and the world. True forgiveness isn't easy, but it transforms us significantly. To forgive is to love and to feel worthy of love. In that sense, it is always worthwhile. -Robert Karen, Phd, Bottom Line Personal, November 1, 2001

Freedom
	Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting. -Voltaire (Fran�ois-Marie Arouet)

Genius
	His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine. -Thomas Alva Edison

Glory
	No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening. -David Jenkins

Goals
	What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason. -Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

God
	How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension. -Robert J. Sawyer

Grace
	Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul. -William Hazlitt

Greatness & Great Things
	It's not what you take but what you leave behind that defines greatness. -Edward Gardner

Health
	The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill; no one except a few precise scientists define it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became real according to the precepts of American Cartesianism: I swallow it, therefore it is. -Florence King

Humanity
	The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines. -Italo Calvino

	We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men. -Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Humor
	Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof. -Stephen Leacock

Identity
	Man may be defined as the animal that can say I, that can be aware of himself as a separate entity. -Erich Fromm

	Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. -Alan Watts

Ignorance & Stupidity
	Every time I try to define a perfectly stable person, I am appalled by the dullness of that person. -J. D. Griffin

Individuality
	Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous. -Anais Nin, The Novel of the Future (New York: Collier Books), 1970

Journalism
	If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles. -Evelyn Waugh

Judging, Judgment
	When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself. -Wayne Dyer

Language
	It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. -Thomas Hardy

Law
	All public interest legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials. The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle. -Ayn Rand

Leadership
	The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant. -Max De Pree, "Leadership Is an Art"

	Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes. -Peter Drucker

	A leader has been defined as one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. -Source Unknown

Life
	To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being. -E. M. Cioran

	Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself. -Harvey Fierstein

	Anything and everything, physical or otherwise, is defined by its absence. -Eric Parslow

Love
	The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others. -Alain de Botton, On Love

	Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover. -Andrea Dworkin

	Never try to define love. Once defined love is confined. Once confined -- It dies. -Source Unknown

	I define love for our purpose as the passion of one being for another in the hope of being loved in return. -Source Unknown

Mankind, Man
	The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

Manners
	A mission could be defined as an image of a desired state that you want to get to. Once fully seen, it will inspire you to act, fuel your imagination and determine your behavior. -Charles A. Garfield

Marriage
	Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership. -Andrea Dworkin

Mathematics
	Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. -Bertrand Russell

	Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as that space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze. -James Joseph Sylvester

Men & Women
	Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation. -Margaret Mead

Mental Illness
	Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell. -Renata Adler

Miracles
	An act of God was defined as something which no reasonable man could have expected. -Auberon Herbert

Morals
	To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny. -Simone Weil

Mother
	Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. -Camille Anna Paglia

Murder
	Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible. -Lewis H. Lapham

Music
	As I define it, rock and roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive -- and it still informs other kinds of music. -David Byrne

Oppression
	I see the eight of us with our 'Secret Annexe' as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by heavy black rain clouds. The round, clearly defined spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching danger closes more and more tightly. Now we are so surrounded by danger and darkness that we bump against each other, as we search desperately for a means of escape. We all look down below, where people are fighting each other, we look above, where it is quiet and beautiful, and meanwhile we are cut off by the great dark mass, which will not let us go upwards, but which stands before us as an impenetrable wall; it tries to crush us, but cannot do so yet. I can only cry and implore: 'Oh, if only the black circle could recede and open the way for us!' -Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: Monday, 8 November, 1943, pg. 103

Order
	That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy. -Freda Adler

Perception
	Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. -Andrea Dworkin

	It is the business of thought to define things, to find the boundaries; thought, indeed, is a ceaseless process of definition. It is the business of Art to give things shape. Anyone who takes no delight in the firm outline of an object, or in its essential character, has no artistic sense. He cannot even be nourished by Art. Like Ephraim, he feeds upon the East wind, which has no boundaries. -Vance Palmer

	In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined. -Thomas Szasz

Pessimism
	You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you're grateful. -Paul Theroux

Philosophy
	Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom. -Marcus Tullius Cicero

Planning
	Strategic planning will help you fully uncover your available options, set priorities for them, and define the methods to achieve them. -Robert J. Mckain

Pleasure
	The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature -John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, pt. 2, Random House (1984)

Poetry
	I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed. -Umberto Eco

Politics
	We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values. -Tony Benn

	We have needed to define ourselves by reclaiming the words that define us. They have used language as weapons. When we open ourselves to what they say and how they say it, our narrow prejudices evaporate and we are nourished and armed. -Selma James

Presidency
	As far as the job of President goes, its rewarding and I've given before this group the definition of happiness for the Greeks. I'll define it again: the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, that the Presidency provides some happiness. -John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Prostitution
	Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined. -Kate Millet

Reading
	You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need. -Peter Kump

Responsibility
	I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life. Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have ? life itself. -Walter Anderson

	This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others. -Elie Wiesel

Rest, Leisure
	Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation. -George Bernard Shaw

Reverence
	The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary, costs nothing. Reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws and respect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot even help. They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing. But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try. If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays, because we can't burn him. http://www.twainquotes.com/Reverence.html -Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Romance
	Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love. -Isaac Disraeli

Running
	Games require skill. Running requires endurance, character, pride, physical strength, and mental toughness. Running is a test, not a game. A test of faith, belief, will, and trust in ones self. So hardcore that it needs a category all to itself to define the pain. When game players criticize, it's because they aren't willing to understand, not because they're stronger. Running is more than a sport; it's a lifestyle. If you have to ask us why we run, you'll never understand, so just accept. -Jessica Propst

Sadness
	Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations. -Edward De Bono

Science
	Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries. -Vannevar Bush

	Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one. -Konrad Lorenz

Selfishness
	Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called self-interestedness. This was not a -George Will

Sex
	Sex is two plus two making five, rather than four. Sex is the X ingredient that you can't define, and it's that X ingredient between two people that make both a man and a woman good in bed. It's all relative. There are no rules. -Marty Feldman

	Society's double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate. -Anne Tucker

Society
	The incipient institution needs some stabilizing principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of social relations to another, and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and endowed with self-validating truth... For discourse to be possible at all, the basic categories have to be agreed on. Nothing else but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution. -Mary Douglas

Sports
	Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see -- not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness. -Lewis H. Lapham

Symbols
	The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial. -Albert Camus

Talent
	This is how I define talent; it is a gift that God has given us in secret, which we reveal without knowing it. -Charles Montesquieu

Terrorism
	If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, planted at the base of Manhattan island with the Statue of Liberty as their sentry, and the Pentagon, a squat, concrete fort on the banks of the Potomac, are the sanctuaries of money and power that our enemies may imagine define us. But that assumes our faith rests on what we can buy and build, and that has never been America's true God. -Nancy Gibbs, Time, Sept. 12, 2001 Special Report: The Day of the Attack, "Time"

Time
	Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires. -Charles Caleb Colton

Truth
	Effective thinking consists of being able to arrive at the truth; truth being defined as that which exists. -Calvin S. Hall

Tyranny
	People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being. -Vaclav Havel

Understanding
	For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. -Ludwig Wittgenstein

War
	What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined. -Archibald MacLeish

	War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent -- war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. -Susan Sontag

Wealth
	WEALTH AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT: Let us define the wealthy man as he who has everything he desires. How to reach that happy condition? Two ways -Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian

	Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream --and yet God blesses it! -Georges Bernanos

Women
	Femininity appears to be one of those pivotal qualities that is so important no one can define it. -Caroline Bird

	No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe. -Adrienne Rich

	The clich? that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies. -Patricia Meyer Spacks

Work
	The question is not whether the system works, but whether we like the way it works. Just because something works doesn't mean it is desirable. Concentration camps work, if your purpose is to enslave people. Stealing works, if all you care about is money. Lying works, if you don't give a damn about your personal integrity. Literally anything, no matter how monstrously immoral will work, depending on your desires and how you define the term work, -Sy Leon

	The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others. -Robert B. Reich

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