The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else

Diplomacy in general does not resolve conflicts. Wars end not due to peace processes, but due to one side giving up.

Daniel Pipes

He who has a why can endure any how

Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't ever really feel that wearing my wedding ring is what determines me being married or not.

Jessica Simpson

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

Eric Hoffer

It is the direction and not the magnitude which is to be taken into consideration.

Thomas Troward

As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Our family life was certainly not intellectual.

Douglass North

I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.

Zoe Kazan

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who

Christopher Hitchens

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

Samuel Johnson

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

Douglas Adams

I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

Golda Meir