The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book you just tell the best story you know how to tell.

Paula Danziger

The most useless are those who never change through the years.

James M. Barrie

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

Niels Bohr

There may indeed be those who would prefer to deny the existence of a God so powerful, rather than believe that all other things are uncertain. But let us not oppose them for the present, and grant that all that is here said of a God is a fable; nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arrived at the state of being that I have reached -- whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method -- since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my origin the less powerful. To these reasons I have certainly nothing to reply, but at the end I feel constrained to confess that there is nothing in all that I formerly believed to be true, of which I cannot in some measure doubt, and that not merely through want of thought or through levity, but for reasons which are very powerful and maturely considered; so that henceforth I ought not the less carefully to refrain from giving credence to these opinions than to that which is manifestly false, if I desire to arrive at any certainty in the sciences.http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/philosophy/descartes/meditations/med1.html

Rene Descartes, Meditations On F

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.

Jerry Saltz

Having more money does not insure happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars.

Hobart Brown

In order to effect great change, we need to look at how we can help those in our own communities as well as globally.

Christina Aguilera

Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together...

Charles Dickens

Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. Sea air was healing, softening, relaxing -- fortifying and bracing -- seemingly just as was wanted -- sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the seabath was the certain corrective; and where bathing disagreed, the sea air alone was evidently designed by nature for the cure.

Jane Austen

Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.

Adlai Stevenson

I love doing comedy. You don't get many good comedy scripts. They're rare. But, I do love playing comedy. Even in drama, I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human.

Colm Meaney

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

Susan Neiman