It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress, that set the standards, the ideals, for others.

Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can't do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.

Keith Richards

The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

If I respect myself and believe in what I'm doing, no one can touch me.

Fiona Apple

Any idiot can get laid when they're famous. That's easy. It's getting laid when you're not famous that takes some talent.

Kevin Bacon

...Sirius had never kept him waiting before...Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him...If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway when Harry was yelling for him as though his life depended on it, the only possible explanation was that he could not come back...That he really was...

J.K. Rowling

the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape.You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.

Virginia Woolf

Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.

Sojourner Truth

A big part of who I am is just the way I was raised. Nobody is better than anyone else, and if you really work hard, you might get lucky and get what you want.

Martina McBride

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Samuel Johnson

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.

Franklin P. Jones

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

John Stuart Mill

Some people, however long their experience or strong their intellect, are temperamentally incapable of reaching firm decisions.

James Callaghan