What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

The strong man is strongest when alone.

Friedrich von Schiller

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

James Baldwin

The 80/20 Principle exists in your business, then the most profitable 1/5 of your business is 16 times more profitable than the remaining 4/5.

Lee J. Colan, Sticking to It

Beauty isn't perfect. It's something to be felt and something to be breathed.

Denise Jaden

[Lisp is the] greatest single programming language ever designed.

Alan Kay

It's all happening too fast. I've got to put the brakes on or I'll smack into something.

Mel Gibson

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

Thomas Huxley

I didn't know if I had the music for it or if I could pull off the larger concert experience. Then I realized if I can just continue to be myself, I'll be all right.

Jason Mraz

My friends, whoever has had experience of evils knows how whenever a flood of ills comes upon mortals, a man fears everything but whenever a divine force cheers on our voyage, then we believe that the same fate will always blow fair.

Aeschylus

Instill the love of you into all the world, for a good character is what is remembered.

Merikare

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book ] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as karmic reassignment) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of and .

Christopher Hitchens

Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.

Emily Mortimer