The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

E. J. Hobsbawm

If you're doing something you love, an hour feels like 5 minutes. If you are doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, 5 minutes feels like an hour.

Sir Ken Robinson

Welcome thy neighbor into thy fallout shelter. He'll come in handy if you run out of food.

Dean McLaughlin

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air... It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

George Bernard Shaw

The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

John Sterling

Perhaps in His wisdom the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Sigmund Freud

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

Wislawa Szymborska

There's no mystique to acting. It's only common sense - and a bit of courage.

Bill Hunter

I mean, I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time, then you're considered a failure. But it's like, 'Well, are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'

Kristen Stewart

More than 20 years ago, President Kennedy defined an approach that is as valid today as when he announced it. So let us not be blind to our differences,'' he said, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved.''Well, those differences are differences in governmental structure and philosophy. The common interests have to do with the things of everyday life for people everywhere. Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, oh, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living?Before they parted company, they would probably have touched on ambitions and hobbies and what they wanted for their children and problems of making ends meet. And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would be saying to Ivan, Wasn't she nice? She also teaches music.'' Or Jim would be telling Sally what Ivan did or didn't like about his boss. They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people don't make wars.People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war. They want to have some of the good things over and above bare subsistence that make life worth living. They want to work at some craft, trade, or profession that gives them satisfaction and a sense of worth. Their common interests cross all borders.http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.htm

Ronald Reagan, Address to the Na

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

Edmund Burke