The attainment of an ideal is often the beginning of a disillusion.

This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.

Will Rogers

I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.

Mark Twain

The truth is you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

Eminem

I can not deny that all may be swept away. Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it I never will. The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause that we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.

Abraham Lincoln

Mark Twain, in an interview today, spoke about hazing at West Point, and denounced the practice as a brutal one and men who indulge in it as bullies and cowards. Why, he said, the fourth class man who is compelled to fight a man from the first class hasn't a show in the world, and it is not intended that he should. I have read the rules provided to prevent such practices, and they are wholly deficient, because one provision is omitted. I would make it the duty of a cadet to report to the authorities any case of hazing which came to his notice; make such reports a part of the vaunted West Point 'code of honor' and the beating of young boys by upper class men will be stopped. I am not opposed to fights among boys as a general thing. If they are conducted in a spirit of fairness, I think it makes boys manly, but I do oppose compelling a little fellow to fight some man big enough to whip two of him. When I was a boy, going to school down in the Mississippi Valley, we used to have our fights, and I remember one occasion on which I got soundly trounced, but we always matched boys as nearly of a size as possible, and there was none of the cowardly methods that seem to prevail at West Point.

Mark Twain, "New York Times", on

I started cooking in kitchens right out of high school, and I was lucky to work with a lot of great people, but I had no idea it would turn into this. Of course no one should go into this business because they want to be the next Emeril.

Tom Colicchio

I've been working on Barb for a while. I looked at her as a sort of every woman. She's incredibly strong she's incredibly generous. She's seemingly insane because she is in the situation of a polygamous relationship, but she had definite reasons to do it.

Jeanne Tripplehorn

Always keep that happy attitude. Pretend that you are holding a beautiful fragrant bouquet.

Earl Nightingale

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Wherefore a man can know nothing by himself, save after a natural manner, which is only that which he attains by means of the senses. For this cause he must have the phantasms and the forms of objects present in themselves and in their likenesses; otherwise it cannot be, for, as philosophers say: Ab objecto et potentia paritur notitia. That is: From the object that is present and from the faculty, knowledge is born in the soul. Wherefore, if one should speak to a man of things which he has never been able to understand, and whose likeness he has never seen, he would have no more illumination from them whatever than if naught had been said of them to him.

Saint John of the Cross, The Asc

I drink to make other people more interesting.

Ernest Hemingway

In suggesting gifts: Money is appropriate, and one size fits all.

William Randolph Hearst