It's my birthday, by the way, and as of 2:05 this morning (the time of my birth in the middle of a snow storm on the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey) I'm 52 years old. I decided to say that because there's such in our culture for women...well, for everybody...to stay perpetually young. And that's never going to change if we (women especially) don't embrace, enjoy, and take pride in each and every age that we pass through. I'm not young, I'm half a century old, and grateful to have made it this far. And I have this to say to the young women coming on behind me: 52 feels pretty damn good!

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Gustave Flaubert

Every view, and every object I studied attentively, by viewing them again and again on every side, for I was anxious to make a lasting impression of it on my imagination.

Karl Philipp Moritz

Communism didn't fall. It was pushed.

George Herbert Walker Bush, July

From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution...It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation.

Bertrand Russell

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Sir Winston Churchill

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

Arthur Miller

Only those live who do good.

Leo Tolstoy

I enjoy every minute, because there are going to be a lot of moments in your future that you're going to wish you held onto longer.

Joe Nichols

Man can never be a woman's equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her.

Mahatma Gandhi

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Raymond Chandler

The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

Fred Astaire

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. Matthew 6:20

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