It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of

Faith! he must make his stories shorter or change his comrades once a quarter.

Jonathan Swift

Meditation is the life of the soul: Action, the soul of meditation. and honor the reward of action.

Francis Quarles

I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word.

Laura Linney

My perfect day is constantly changing. Right now, it would be to lie around in a hammock reading with a portable phone and a table of food next to it. I would spend all day there. And that's all that I can possibly come up with on the spur of the moment.

Eric Stoltz

The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.

Thomas Mann, From the Introducti

Never accept a drink from a Urologist.

Erma Bombeck

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

John Donne

In our thrifty populations of merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and professional men, there is little sense for beauty, little pure thought, little genuine culture; but they are prosperous and self-satisfied.

John Lancaster Spalding

Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

Source Unknown

Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom's apple pie.

Harry Reasoner, 60 Minutes

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

William Dean Howells

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

Gloria Steinem