The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise.

No matter how full the river, it still wants to grow.

African Proverb

One of the oldest human needs is having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

Margaret Mead

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

Booker T. Washington

Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Lily Tomlin

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

Charles Dickens

My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him, All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression- What an awkward woman am I. My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moonBut instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon. But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way. My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls...Still, the love from my heart is overflowing, As bright and crimson as the heated metal in a blacksmith's forge.

Kim Dong Hwa

I'm tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. We are supposed to work it.

Alexander Woollcott

For whatever reason, not all people are born with the particular gift of being able to express ourselves through music. And, believe me, it is a gift.

Billy Joel

When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would've had a chance. Because that's where my real heart was.

Steve Martin

The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

Abraham Lincoln

I absolutely don't care about my looks and I'm so used to them that I wouldn't change a thing. I would end up missing my defects.

Colin Firth

Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!

Robert Browning