The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

Roger Ebert

You'd be amazed how much fun you can have if you get out of your own head. The problem is that now people are only interested in themselves. What we have is a non-voting generation. That's what they should call you guys, the non-voting generation. You think you can't fix anything until you fix yourselves. Well, let me be the first to tell you, you will never fix yourselves.p.32

Stephen Elliott

If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbroker's do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

Oscar Wilde

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Josh Billings

I spent two years in the Army. And my older brother, who was also a great positive influence on me, encouraged me to think about law school, and I said - well, I didn't have any money.

George J. Mitchell

The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary, costs nothing. Reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws and respect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot even help. They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing. There is no personal merit in breathing. But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try. If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays, because we can't burn him.http://www.twainquotes.com/Reverence.html

Mark Twain, Following the Equato

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

George Orwell

The secret is to always let the other man have your way.

Claiborne Pell

Patriotism is considered to be an emotion a person ought to feel. But why? Why is it nobler to love your own country than to love someone else's?

Wallace Shawn

We fear doing too little when we should do more. Then atone by doing too much, when perhaps we should do less.

Robert Trout

Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.

Yukio Mishima

Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.

Richard Rhodes