Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not. His influence on the dissident writers of the Soviet Uniton was enormous. Figures like Grossman or Solzhenitsyn, although their language is less elevated, were dominated by a Tolstoyan desire to use fiction to tell the truth of history.

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Thomas Hardy

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein, from Time En

My brand is a demography-breaker. It speaks to all homemakers and women from all walks of life and all across society.

Sandra Lee

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what we are.

Terry Pratchett

There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.

Salman Rushdie

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Aldous Huxley

Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

Warren Weaver

But it has, in addition, an even more precious quality - a consciousness of the human intelligence, the human spirit and that man is a social creature.

Norman McLaren

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Henri Matisse

The water cooler conversation in every job I've had is sports, it's what did you do this weekend, it's 'How are your parents doing?'

Kal Penn

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Benjamin Franklin