My dad was a carpenter and I would work with him during the summer and umpire on the nights I wasn't playing.

Energetic action on debt would make a radical difference to the prospects of many of the poorest countries in the world, at no practical cost to creditor countries.

Kenneth Clarke

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

Ellen Glasgow

If you can actually count your money, then you're not a rich man.

J. Paul Getty

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

James Buchan

nothing that is worth knowing can be taught

Oscar Wilde

Living with a god is not what it's cracked up to be. They think their women should be grateful just to have them around.

Orson Scott Card

My mom is a very warm, typical sort of Jewish-mother type. And my dad has a somewhat, um, different personality.

Peter Orszag

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Oscar Wilde

Delirium and dazzlement are in a relation which constitutes the essence of madness, exactly as truth and light, in their fundamental relation, constitute classical reason.

Michel Foucault

During the crusades all were religious mad, and now all are mad for want of it.

Captain J. G. Stedman

To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.

Ernest Hemingway

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Neil Gaiman