You can't hire someone to practice for you.

If I was not a remarkably modest man, I should probably brag a little, and say that I had done what no American ever before accomplished by visiting the queen at her palace twice within eight days.

P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum

But out of that silence rose new sounds more appalling still; a strange ventriloquism, of which you could not locate the source, a smothered moan, as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key-note weird, unearthly, terrible to hear and bear, yet startling with its nearness; the writhing concord broken by cries for help, some begging for a drop of water, some calling on God for pity; and some on friendly hands to finish what the enemy had so horribly begun; some with delirious, dreamy voices murmuring loved names, as if the dearest were bending over them; and underneath, all the time, the deep bass note from closed lips too hopeless, or too heroic to articulate their agony...It seemed best to bestow myself between two dead men among the many left there by earlier assaults, and to draw another crosswise for a pillow out of the trampled, blood-soaked sod, pulling the flap of his coat over my face to fend off the chilling winds, and still more chilling, the deep, many voiced moan that overspread the field.

Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

Old times never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.

George E. Woodberry

I honestly believe that there's an element in this country, in our politics, that does not want to see a businessman succeed at getting the nomination for the Republican party, and does not want me to succeed at becoming President of the United States of America.

Herman Cain

In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.

Ravi Shankar

Language is fossil poetry

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Kary Mullis

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.

John Maynard Keynes

My dad was a musician, it was just what he did, like another guy's dad drives a meat truck. Our house was normal. We weren't taken with the fact our dad was a musician.

Branford Marsalis

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

Ayn Rand

It was once said that if you took all of the people who fell asleep in church and laid them end to end they would be more comfortable.

Source Unknown

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.

George Orwell