Incompetent people are, at most, 1% of the problem. The other 99% are good people trying to do a good job who make very simple mistakes and it's the process that set them up to make these mistakes.

The solid, middle-class values of hard work, responsibility, family, community, and faith my father talked about tirelessly from Iowa to New York, he lived at home. The hopes he had for his family and for me, he had for all Americans. I think Americans understood this.

Chelsea Clinton

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Henry David Thoreau

I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.

Osamu Dazai

Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Mark Twain

Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.

Criss Jami

You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

Epicurus

I got hold of a copy of the video that showed how Saddam Hussein had actually confirmed himself in power. This snuff-movie opens with a plenary session of the Ba'ath Party central committee: perhaps a hundred men. Suddenly the doors are locked and Saddam, in the chair, announces a special session. Into the room is dragged an obviously broken man, who begins to emit a robotic confession of treason and subversion, that he sobs has been instigated by Syrian and other agents. As the (literally) extorted confession unfolds, names begin to be named. Once a fellow-conspirator is identified, guards come to his seat and haul him from the room. The reclining Saddam, meanwhile, lights a large cigar and contentedly scans his dossiers. The sickness of fear in the room is such that men begin to crack up and weep, rising to their feet to shout hysterical praise, even love, for the leader. Inexorably, though, the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. When it is over, about half the committee members are left, moaning with relief and heaving with ardent love for the boss. (In an accompanying sequel, which I have not seen, they were apparently required to go into the yard outside and shoot the other half, thus sealing the pact with Saddam. I am not sure that even Beria or Himmler would have had the nerve and ingenuity and cruelty to come up with that.)

Christopher Hitchens

My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.

Pearl S. Buck

Have you had a kindness shown? Pass it on; 'twas not given for thee alone, Pass it on; Let it travel down the years, Let it wipe another's tears, Till in Heaven the deed appears, Pass it on.

Henry Burton

Napoleon affords us an example of the danger of elevating one's self to the absolute, and sacrificing everything to the carrying out of an idea.

Johann von Goethe