My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.

America is a model of force and freedom and moderation -- with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor as ourselves; modern society acknowledges no neighbor.

Benjamin Disraeli

I loved 'White Christmas' for the music aspect. I was into musical theater.

Lana Parrilla

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Stephen Covey

Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score;Then to that twenty, add a hundred more:A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on,To make that thousand up a million.Treble that million, and when that is done,Let's kiss afresh, as when we first begun.drawing inspiration from Catullus

Robert Herrick, Hesperides

A man can become so accustomed to the thought of his own faults that he will begin to cherish them as charming little personal characteristics.

Helen Rowland

There's only one thing that can guarantee our failure, and that's if we quit.

Craig Breedlove

Never begin the day until it is finished on paper.

Jim Rohn

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

J. K. Rowling

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book ] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as karmic reassignment) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of and .

Christopher Hitchens

There are no shortcuts in life - only those we imagine.

Frank Leahy

I only have one child. But I am learning that there is a lot to being a parent that you did not expect.

Dee Snider