When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend.
William Blake

The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.
Robert Kennedy

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
James Madison

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
James Madison

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
T. S. Eliot

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.
Malcolm X

We are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of Nature has placed in our power... the battle, sir, is not to the strong alone it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.
Patrick Henry

Character in a saint means the disposition of Jesus Christ persistently manifested.
Oswald Chambers

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
George Orwell

If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
P. J. O'Rourke

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
John Keats

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Richard Dawkins

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity.
Lauren Bacall

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.
Douglas MacArthur

Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able to do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe