WIST

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-American physicist
(Spurious)
Though often attributed to Einstein, this has been found in various humorous sources dating back to the 1920s. More info.

The finest pleasure is kindness to others.

Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696) French essayist, moralist
(Attributed)

We all know the rule of umbrellas — if you take your umbrella, it will will not rain; if you leave it, it will.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist and poet
Journal (1873)

Gentlemen, you can never make me believe — no statute can ever convince me, that there is any infinite Being in this universe who hates an honest man. It is impossible to satisfy me that there is any God, or can be any God, who holds in abhorrence a soul that has the courage to express his thought. Neither can the whole world convince me that any man should be punished, either in this world or in the next, for being candid with his fellow-men. If you send men to the penitentiary for speaking their thoughts, for endeavoring to enlighten their fellows, then the penitentiary will become a place of honor, and the victim will step from it — not stained, not disgraced, but clad in robes of glory.

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer and orator
Trial of C.B. Reynolds for blasphemy (May 1887)
Full text.

Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
“A Poem of Difficult Hope,” What Are People For? (1990)