My dad has a really great record collection that basically went up to the year I was born: 1984.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

Marya Mannes

'Tis all men's office to speak patience To those that wring under the load of sorrow; But no man's virtue nor sufficiency To be so moral when he shall endure The like himself

William Shakespeare

Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must - must - redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition re-distributional.

Donald Berwick

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

Tom Robbins

The power of thought, the magic of the mind.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

In principle, there are only three main components of spending that much matter to monetary policy: consumer spending, business investment and exports and trade.

Evan Davis

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

Christopher Hitchens

I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear.

Freddie Mercury

I actually pray everyday, but I don't believe in God.

Harvey Fierstein

The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

Well-written words are music.

William Shatner

The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm

Sylvia Plath