Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon them.

Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

George Bernard Shaw

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.

Victor Hugo

An autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Barbara G. Harris

Divinity for the sake of the simple-minded is beautiful. Those theological assertions you write, say, or live by that you later feel foolish about, it means God still lives in you enough to tell you that they were indeed foolish. By mistakes you know you are alive.

Criss Jami

More people should read books. It's the most concentrated experience you can have.

Vivienne Westwood

The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting -- the war and the revolution -- and the character of the accused -- revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power -- you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.

Leon Trotsky

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

There are two kinds of power you have to fight. The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no.

Martin Scorsese

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls

William Styron, Quoted in James

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Havelock Ellis

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.

Robert Francis Kennedy