The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

-- Theodore Bikel

If you're trying to please everyone, then you're not going to make anything that is honestly yours, I don't think, in the long run.

-- Viggo Mortensen

Because they commonly make use of treasure found in books, as of other treasure belonging to the dead and hidden underground; for they dispose of both with great secrecy, defacing the shape and image of the one as much as of the other.

-- Sir William Davenant

Why there is no gray with plagiarism and why trying to make it ambiguous causes our children to grow up without a moral code.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/31/48hours/main510772.shtml

It comes down to the fact that you supply the blue, and they supply the other colors and mix them with your blue, and maybe there's some blue left in the painting and maybe there isn't. Maybe there wasn't supposed to be any there in the first place. So have some fun and make a good blue and walk away.

-- Viggo Mortensen

He liked those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others' books; And ruin half an author's graces By plucking bon-mots from their places.

-- Hannah More

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(said with utmost sarcasm I'm sure)

I think that people who get to a certain position, and then try to ferociously defend it or build on it, it's kind of a dead-end street. You see people becoming miserable that way.

-- Viggo Mortensen

My books need no one to accuse or judge you: the page which is yours stands up against you and says, "You are a thief."

-- Marcus Valerius Martial