We're competing with everything: the beach, the mall, bookstores. Libraries are in a transition right now, caught between two forces, the old ways and technology. Libraries are under a lot of pressure to provide both.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Most men pray for power, the strength to do things. Few people pray for love, the quality to be someone.

Robert D. Foster

Oh, God, I struggle with low self-esteem all the time! I think everyone does. I have so much wrong with me, it's unbelievable!

Angelina Jolie

The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wr

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

Paul Wellstone

Fighting terrorism is like being a goalkeeper. You can make a hundred brilliant saves but the only shot that people remember is the one that gets past you.

Paul Wilkinson

A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Choose your companions from the best Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

William Butler Yeats

War is at its best barbarism.

William Tecumseh Sherman

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Benjamin Disraeli

You always say 'I'll quit when I start to slide', and then one morning you wake up and realize you've done slid.

Sugar Ray Robinson

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.

Hesketh Pearson