Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.

The best business plans are straightforward documents that spell out the who, what, where, why, and how much...

Paula Nelson

Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth.

William Warburton

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Ursula K. LeGuin

I'm interested in all forms of performance, yet I think it's difficult to be as equally talented in all of them as they call for such different skills. At the moment, I still feel I'm learning and want as much experience and variety as possible.

Felicity Jones

In conclusion, there is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but, by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. What will you do, Bertie, if it turns out you're wrong? she asked. I mean, what if -- uh -- when the time comes, you should meet Him? What will you say? Russell was delighted with the question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, Why, I should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'

Al Seckel, in Preface to Bertran

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

Erich Fromm

The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history and he failed to build a true international coalition.

Nancy Pelosi

Sound science must be a basis to governing our trade relations around the globe.

Bill Frist

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Joyce Carol Oates

As for myself, may the sweet Muses, as Virgil says, bear me away to their holy places where sacred streams do flow, beyond the reach of anxiety and care, and free from the obligation of performing each day some task that goes against the grain. May I no longer have anything to do with the mad racket and the hazards of the forum, or tremble as I try a fall with white-faced Fame. I do not want to be roused from sleep by the clatter of morning callers or by some breathless messenger from the palace; I do not care, in drawing my will, to give a money-pledge for its safe execution through anxiety as to what is to happen afterwards; I wish for no larger estate than I can leave to the heir of my own free choice. Some day or other the last hour will strike also for me, and my prayer is that my effigy may be set up beside my grave, not grim and scowling, but all smiles and garlands, and that no one shall seek to honour my memory either by a motion in the senate or by a petition to the Emperor.

Tacitus

There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing.

William Shakespeare

Nature was here a series of wonders, and a fund of delight.

Daniel Boone