The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

Neil Gaiman

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world...They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

John Connolly

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

Marcel Proust

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

Robert James Waller

...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Liberalism -- it is well to recall this today -- is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak.

Jos

Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.

Michael Shermer

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

Oscar Wilde

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

James R. Cook

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me.

Thomas Merton

This is the trouble with all happiness - all of it is built on top of something that men want.

Chris Cleave

Global thinking and local action both require understanding of ecological systems, but ecological management can be effective only if it takes into consideration the visceral and spiritual values that link us to the earth. Therefore ecological thinking must be supplemented by humanistic value judgments concerning the effect of our choices and actions on the quality of the relationship between humankind and earth, in the future as well as in the present.http://www.bookrags.com/Ren%C3%A9_Dubos

Ren, The Wooing of Earth, p. 157