Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
-

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this; for it will come to pass that every braggart will be found an ass.

- William Shakespeare

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

- Ogden Nash

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

- Ogden Nash

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.

- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

In Germany after World War II, the authors of what was called Trümmerliteratur, rubble literature, felt the need to rebuild their language, poisoned by Nazism, as well as their country, which lay in ruins. They understood that reality, truth, needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, with new language, just as the bombed cities needed to be rebuilt…And it is for us…to undertake the task of rebuilding…faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.

Salman Rushdie, Truth

I love to laugh
Loud and long and clear
I love to laugh
It's getting worse ev'ry year

Mary Poppins

You and I are birds that don't fly together.

- A.J. Cronin, Hatter's Castle

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

- Seamus Heaney