Intelligence: I was asked tonight why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won t. 1. I am not an intellectual. Two minutes talk with Aldous Huxley, William Glock, or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat, drink, smoke, and relax. 4. I don't know very much, but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

Far better a neighbor that is near than a brother far off.

Bible

The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose.

Jodi Picoult

But just playing the partner of someone famous, I had a lot more freedom.

Rachel Griffiths

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Baltasar Gracian

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

Bertrand Russell

We need to stop this New World Order ideology now. First, by being educated and informed about it.

James Dye

Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.

Mark Twain

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley

Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.

Benjamin Cardozo

We are all failures -- at least, all the best of us are.

James Barrie

So often, I read scripts and am like, 'This would never happen in real life. It's not trying to be funny. It's trying to be serious.'

Shailene Woodley

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president only the second impeachment hearing in American history you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.

Christopher Hitchens