My dad's era believed that there was something noble in being a good guy - the kind of guy that lived straight and narrow, told the truth, and stood up for what he believed was right.

The Establishment center ... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster -- a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

George McGovern

Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.

Bill Bryson

Novels are longer than life.

Natalie Clifford Barney

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

Kate Millet

Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus it may be looked on as weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent relieves we receive from it and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.

Malcolm De Chazal

I'm quitting the business today. I'm going to open up an appliance store, I've always really been into toasters. I'm giving it all up.

Dane Cook

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.

Walter Isaacson

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Joseph Addison

...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept.

Leo Tolstoy

The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application.

Miguel de Cervantes

He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.

Robert Caro