The junk-bond era has also spawned something that calls itself New Historicism. This seems to be a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense.

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am over instructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Natu

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

Edward George BulwerLytton

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Thomas Huxley

Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.

Booker T. Washington

Home is the nicest word there is.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

Steven Wright

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

Elie Wiesel

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonightto you, the great silent majority of my fellow AmericansI ask for your support.

Richard Milhous Nixon

You can't rely just on talent to win.

Scott Young

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.

Franz Kafka

True morality makes fun of morality.

Blaise Pascal