It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

J.K. Rowling

I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.

Tallulah Bankhead

I have cancer. Cancer doesn't have me.

Marco Calderon

Moreover, from reforming the tax code to our immigration system, to commonsense legal reform, President Bush put America on notice that he will continue fighting to make the country, and the world, a better place for future generations.

Jim Sensenbrenner

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

S. I. Hayakawa

I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake, for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Walt Whitman

It is a sobering thought, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.

Tom Lehrer

In soliciting donations from his flock, a preacher may promise eternal life in a celestial city whose streets are paved with gold, and that's none of the law's business. But if he promises an annual free stay in a luxury hotel on Earth, he'd better have the rooms available.

Charlotte Observer

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

George Bernard Shaw

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

E.N. Kirk

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

Mark Twain