My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.

Ambrose Bierce

Some fell by laudanum, and some by steel, and death in ambush lay in every pill.

Sir Samuel Garth

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

George Bernard Shaw

Part of the reason I sort of shot out like a cannon out of Michigan and left home at such an early age is because I had to feel independent.

Madonna Ciccone

If you are really Master of your Fate, it shouldn't make any difference to you whether Cleopatra or the Bearded Lady is your mate.

Ogden Nash

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

Victor Hugo

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love...

George Eliot

I'm supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them.

Frank Sinatra

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.

Charles Caleb Colton

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....

George Bernard Shaw

People are pretty much alike. It's only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities.

Linda Ellerbee

Peace if possible, but truth at any rate.

Martin Luther