The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.

Nicholson Baker

When the skies are looking bad my dear and your heart's lost all its hope, after dawn there will be sunshine and all the dust will go, the skies will clear my darling, I'll wake up with the one I love the most and in the morning I'll make you up some tea and toast

Lucy Spraggan

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own case and deciding in its own favour would be rather simple minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

C.S. Lewis

The purpose and cause of the incarnation was that He might illuminate the world by His wisdom and excite it to the love of Himself.

Peter Abelard

Would you have wished more, or fewer, anarchists around in the Thousand Year Reich or any of the other fantasies of hierarchy?

Christopher Hitchens

Hold fast to youth and beauty.

Elizabeth Arden

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.

Patti Smith

This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.

William Lyon Phelps

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

That we may live to see England once more possess a free Monarchy and a privileged and prosperous People, is my Prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the energy and devotion of our Youth is my persuasion. We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.

Benjamin Disraeli

For us, sons of France, political sentiment is a passion while, for the Englishmen, politics are a question of business.

Wilfrid Laurier

It's not like I'm the most famous person in the world.

Ron Silver