The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.

John Stuart Mill

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

Henry Louis Gates

The short bloom of our brief and narrow life flies far away. While we are calling for flowers and wine and woman, old age is upon us.

Juvenal

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience -- well, that comes from poor judgment.

Cousin Woodman

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H. L. Mencken

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution's in the soul.

Norman Mailer

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

Sigmund Freud

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Don Piatt

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

Helen Keller

There is a serene and settled majesty to woodland scenery that enters into the soul and delights and elevates it, and fills it with noble inclinations.

Washington Irving

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

Rihanna

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes.

Jack Dee