What makes vanity so insufferable to us, is that it hurts our own.

I do support artists standing by their beliefs and walking with integrity. We have to find a better way to commercially exploit music while giving artists their proper respect. This cannot be done while taking their contributions for granted or trying to control the scope of their growth and power through threats and fear tactics.

Lauryn Hill

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If I be the first of us to die,Let grief not blacken long your sky.Be bold yet modest in your grieving.There is a change but not a leaving.For just as death is part of life,The dead live on forever in the living.And all the gathered riches of our journey,The moments shared, the mysteries explored,The steady layering of intimacy stored,The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,The wordless language of look and touch,The knowing,Each giving and each taking,These are not flowers that fade,Nor trees that fall and crumble,Nor are they stone,For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstandAnd mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.What we were, we are.What we had, we have.A conjoined past imperishably present.So when you walk the wood where once we walkedtogetherAnd scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,Be still.Close your eyes.Breathe.Listen for my footfall in your heart.I am not gone but merely walk within you.

Nicholas Evans, from The Smoke J

The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream, not society's dream, her own personal dream.

Barbara Bush

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Aldous Huxley

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.

Samuel Johnson

There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer - or maybe president.

Herbert Hoover

It says something about this new global economy that USA Today now reports every morning on the day's events in Asian markets.

Lawrence Summers

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury -- to me these have always been contemptible. I assume that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind

Albert Einstein

As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else. The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No E

Catholics and evangelicals need to remain allied, and in solidarity, against the increasingly aggressive secularism of our age.

Gary Bauer

I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place.

James Naismith