The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building.

You see, to find the brightest wisdom one must pass through the darkest zones. And through the darkest zones there can be no guide. No guide, that is, but courage

Adam Gidwitz

The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.

Charles Montesquieu

Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.

Michael Chabon

Optimism. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

Ambrose Bierce

Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Viktor E. Frankl

The truth is that most busy people cannot sustain a seven-day-a-week training schedule. There are too many other stresses and responsibilities in their lives.

PattiSue Plumber

Lay on, Macduff, And damn'd be him that first cries, Hold, enough

William Shakespeare

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

Leo Tolstoy

I could never drive in a great big car people like me because I'm a man of the people, a hustler.

Terry McAuliffe

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

W. Somerset Maugham

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that we choose death.

Dame Barbara Ward

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson