Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

William Saroyan

The number of those who have nothing to recommend them and of those in whom nothing but good can be found is probably equal

Lady Murasaki Shikibu

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.

Laura Miller

Comedy is not funny. Comedy is hard work and timing and lots and lots of rehearsals.

Larry Hagman

If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play ? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber ?... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage ? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.

Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise o

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

Dejan Stojanovic

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

Edgar Allan Poe

If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

George Eliot

What's your dream and to what corner of the missions world will it take you?

Eleanor Roat

Well, it is so difficult right now when you look out on the road and how fast people go and the more and more cars you see out there, for teenagers, you'd think a kid that literally, a few years before, was sitting back in a car seat in the back seat is now behind the wheel.

Amy Klobuchar

It was impossible to quarrel with words, whose tremulous inequality showed indisposition so plainly.

Jane Austen

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

George Bernard Shaw