The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

Benjamin Franklin

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I looked at the campers, all of them grim and determined. I tried not to feel like this was the last time I'd ever see them all together. 'You're the greatest heroes of this millennium,' I told them. 'It doesn't matter how many monsters come at you. Fight bravely, and we will win.' I raised Riptide and shouted, 'FOR OLYMPUS!' They shouted in response, and our forty voices echoed off the buildings of Midtown.

Rick Riordan

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

Richard Russo

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

David Hume

When I was eight years old, I got a dummy for Christmas and started teaching myself. I got books and records and sat in front of the bathroom mirror, practising. I did my first show in the third grade and just kept going there was no reason to quit.

Jeff Dunham

Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art

Thomas Jefferson

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

William James

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge

It is better to be silent, and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Silvan Engel

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist when asked if he is a Newtonian, or if he is a Pasteurian.There are truths so evident, so much a part of people's knowledge, that it is now useless to discuss them.

Che Guevara

When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing -- deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.

John Galsworthy