Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't.

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.

Katherine Mansfield

As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

Christopher Hitchens

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense I call it intelligence.

Malcolm X

If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we'd all be millionaires.

Abigail Van Buren

Leadership is an action, not a position.

Donald McGannon

Everybody thinks I'm at death's door, but I'm not. There's nothing seriously wrong with me, and my heart is in 100 percent working order. Anything else you may hear is a damn lie!

Bobby Darin

The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.

Dante Alighieri

Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie Dust unto dustThe calm, sweet earth that mothers all who dieAs all men must;Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwellToo strong to striveWithin each steel-bound coffin of a cell,Buried alive;But rather mourn the apathetic throngThe cowed and the meekWho see the world's great anguish and its wrongAnd dare not speak!

Ralph Chaplin, Mourn Not the Dea

The founder of the Mona Foundation actually knew my dad for years, and the more I learned about it, the more I realized I really found the perfect charity. It sponsors schools and educational initiatives all over the planet.

Rainn Wilson

We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws.

Paul Davies

It's not wrong to hustle hustlers. It's like killing murderers, a public service. -Damon Salvatore

L.J. Smith

I think movies do play a valuable role in turning people on to the act of reading. I think that phenomenon just creates readers. At first they're going to love 'Harry Potter,' or they may love 'The Hunger Games,' but after that, they're going to love the act of reading and wonder, 'What else can I read?'

Gary Ross