How can we hope to remain economically competitive in a world in which... 90% of Dutch high-school students take advanced math courses and 100% of teachers in Germany have double majors, while the best we can say about our pocket of excellence is that 75% of American students have learned to critique tactfully?

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.

Victor Hugo

Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.

Benjamin Disraeli

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

John Steinbeck

He who would travel happily must travel light

Antoine De SaintExupery

Let's not dismiss or attack individual ideas as being inadequate before we have had a chance to assess their positive effect as part of a whole solution.

John Thune

I think marriage is ghastly.

Rupert Everett

I do believe at the end of the night when you're with your family, the character gets hung up on the door like a coat, and is there to be taken on the next morning.

Liam Neeson

When you're a kid, I think you want to be a film star. And I'm not as enamoured with that any more. The reality of that life is a lot of travel, and a lot of being away, which is impractical because I have four children, so I don't want to be away that much, not the other side of the world away.

Rob Brydon

Yeah, I know I'm ugly... I said to a bartender, 'Make me a zombie.' He said 'God beat me to it.'

Rodney Dangerfield

History, a distillation of rumour.

Thomas Carlyle

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

Soren Kierkegaard