No matter how loud the stadium is, once you're on that field and that offense walks up to the line, it's silent. You can only hear the guys on the field. It's amazing how much concentration you can have when it's required and how powerful your mind is to give it to you.

I think we have to notice that the business processes we use right now for thinking and planning and budgeting and strategy are all delivered on very tight agendas.

Margaret J. Wheatley

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

Jean Giraudoux, The Enchanted, 1

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Joseph Conrad

Science is one of a handful of things that defines us as a very special species. It is amazing how far we have been able to get and how accurate our predictions are. I think understanding how the universe was born is very important. It really gives us a perspective on many things.

Yuri Milner

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand (19

Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it

Blaise Pascal

Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.

Jonathan Sacks

In the aftermath of the recent wave action in the Indian Ocean, even the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williamson [], proved himself a latter-day Voltairean by whimpering that he could see how this might shake belief in a friendly creator. Williamson is of course a notorious fool, who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep, but even so, one is forced to rub one's eyes in astonishment. Is it possible that a grown man could live so long and still have his personal composure, not to mention his lifetime job description, upset by a large ripple of seawater?

Christopher Hitchens

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

David Hackett Fischer, Historian

I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor, so I come from a very academic background. I love writing, you know?

Kerry Washington

I also have this incredible love for women.

Kevyn Aucoin

Food was always a big part of my life. My grandfather was one of 14 kids, and his parents had a pasta factory, so as a kid, he and his siblings would sell pasta door to door. After he became a movie producer, he opened up De Laurentiis Food Stores - one in Los Angeles and one in New York.

Giada De Laurentiis