The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.

Harold Pinter

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Carol Shields

I have this home in New York, I have a long-term relationship with my boyfriend, who's from Australia, and I had this business that I had maintain. Even though I wasn't actively shooting, there's a lot of peripheral work.

Claire Danes

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.

Rabbi Harold Kushner

The White House alone cannot hold its opponents accountable.

Paul Weyrich

Easy is right. Begin right, and you will be easy. Continue easy and you are right... The right way to go easy is to forget the right way, and forget that the going is easy.

Chuang Tzu

Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we're in a battle between tyranny and freedom - it's a series of pendulum swings.

Jon Stewart

Most people show up for work being physically accoutered but mentally disheveled.

Eric Butterworth

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Samuel Butler

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion

Robert A. Heinlein

We are all spiritual beings having a human experience.

Anon., personal

Passion costs me too much to bestow it on every trifle.

Thomas Adams