As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists.

A favorite has no friend!

Thomas Gray

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Eric Hoffer

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

Alfred Hitchcock

Live, so you do not have to look back and say: 'God, how I have wasted my life.'

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.

Thomas Dekker

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, north Beverly. It was cool, everybody's cool on the block.

Craig Robinson

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought , and attended to my answer.

Henry David Thoreau

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!

Christian Nevell Bovee

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.

Arnold Bennett

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

Joseph Addison

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swa

Christopher Hitchens