My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel a ton of pleasure and very little pain -- and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain.

Only in America do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedal pushers and mink stoles -- and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech -- look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.

Philip Roth

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Isaiah Berlin

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

Marlee Matlin

When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.

Herbert Hoover

As yet, Bernard Shaw hasn't become prominent enough to have any enemies, but none of his friends like him.

Oscar Wilde

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

Thomas Jefferson

I'm not giving up my history and what I've done in my music because I love it and I'm very proud of it. I just want to open it up for more people.

LL Cool J

I mean the beauty of being a writer is it's not like being a swimmer. When they were talking about our Olympic swimmers and they'd say, 'Oh she's so old,' and she's all of 25 or something. So the beauty for a writer is that you can keep doing it right into your dotage, and I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can get away with it, yeah.

Geraldine Brooks

I was sleeping the other night, alone, thanks to the exterminator.

Emo Philips

There is no need for false solidity when you are at peace with the universal expanse of your true Being.

Michael A. Singer

People who matter are most aware that everyone else does, too.

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.

Marian Wright Edelman