There are two novels that can change a fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Love the Lord with all your heart and all your might and all your soul and love your neighbor as you do yourself.

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

They came first for the socialists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came for the unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these your homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The long run is a misleading guide to public affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

Pray for the dead and fight like Hell for the living.

A man who hasn't found something that he is willing to die for isn't fit to live.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

Ideas are bullet proof.

Silence like a cancer grows.

Do the menschkeit thing.

Every fool's got a reason to feel sorry for himself and turning his heart to stone.

All things are possible. Keep the faith. Speak the truth. Never surrender.

This rabble you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?

You've got the whole damn thing all wrong. He's not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.

Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable and Lightness has a call that's hard to hear.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

If not me, who? If not now, when?

I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

I never gave anyone hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

My hand was made strong by the hand of the Almighty.

I refuse to live in a country where corporations have more rights than people do. And I'm not leaving.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

My family and friends are the best things I know. Through the Eye of the Needle I'll carry them home.

Some people ain't no damn good. You can't trust 'em, you can't love 'em. No good deed goes unpunished. I don't mind being down with them boys. I've had that pleasure for years and years.

I don't give a damn for the same old played out scenes. I don't give a damn for just the in-betweens.

This life that I live, it's took me everywhere. There ain't no place I ain't never gone.

You can stand me up at the Gates of Hell but I won't back down.

To good friends we have and good friends we've lost along the way. In this bright future you can't forget your past. So dry your tears I say.

Well, I tried didn't I? Godammit, at least I did that.