If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

Max Weber

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Opportunities? They are all around us...There is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to discover it.

Orison Swett Marden

We do not know what is really good or bad fortune.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Younger women have no problem in reconciling beauty with ambitions as a professional woman.

Camille Paglia

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

George Orwell

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

Michel Foucault

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found to be generally true that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon so long as there is no answer to it gives claws to the weak.

George Orwell

It's just as hard... staying happily married as it is doing movies.

Tom Hanks

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

H. L. Mencken

Experts on romance say for a happy marriage there has to be more than a passionate love. For a lasting union, they insist, there must be a genuine liking for each other. Which, in my book, is a good definition for friendship.

Marilyn Monroe

If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.

P. J. O'Rourke