George Washington

Treat them (prisoners of war) with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.

George Orwell

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

- from the essay "Politics and the English Language"

Daniel Gilbert

A lot of the happiness we get from money we don't get from money, per se -- we get it from our money divided by our neighbor's money. So much of our satisfaction with our income is relative, not absolute; it's not based on the number of dollars we make, it's the number of dollars we make relative to the number of dollars that other people around us are making. When people say, 'Gosh, if I could just earn a little more I'd be happier,' well, if you're the poorest guy in the neighborhood, that might be true, even if you're the poorest guy in Greenwich, Conn. But if you're the richest guy in the neighborhood, even if you're the richest guy in the Bronx, it probably isn't true.

Ellen Goodman

"Normal" is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.