Americans are free to choose everything from what they eat, drive and watch on TV to the President of the United States. Yet, when it comes to allowing Americans to choose the health insurance that works best for them and their family, the freedom to choose suddenly becomes un-American.

I've remembered that most of life is about small, essential connections, so unobtrusive, so elastic, that you scarcely realize they're actually holding you together. The big ones-the great, grand emotional bonds-those are the ones that break, the ones that fail you, the ones that give way and send you careening toward the foot of the bleak and jagged canyon. It's the tough, gnarled, unadorned ties that really do bind, that never let you fall all the way down into darkness.

Sharon Shinn

But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring.

John Green

The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.

Fulton John Sheen

The work of many of the greatest men, inspired by duty, has been done amidst suffering and trial and difficulty. They have struggled against the tide, and reached the shore exhausted.

Samuel Smiles

I've never fallen in love right off the bat. I get scared to say I love you too soon because it means so much. It means you're not seeing an end to things.

Leighton Meester

Everything that you want Santa to be, he is.

Mick Foley

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

Robert H. Jackson

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Henry George

A man's true wealth is the good he does in the world. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Kahlil Gibran

To our Creator, a small detail is a big deal.

Todd Stocker

The lessons of history? There are four: The bee fertilizes the flower it robs; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power; the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small; when it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Charles Austin Beard

Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

Ben Okri