Our national motto is 'In God we Trust,' reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.

[from ]For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.[...]The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: 'The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew...' and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist's deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.

Leo Tolstoy

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me'.

Erma Bombeck

I used to be hung up on my figure, but it's a waste of time. I don't believe in diets. Have four pints one night, be healthy the next.

Sophie Ellis Bextor

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

Harold Pinter

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Thomas A. Edison

Nobody can misunderstand a boy like his own mother. Mothers at present can bring children into the world, but this performance is apt to mark the end of their capacities. They can't even attend to the elementary animal requirements of their offspring. It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers.

Norman Douglas

If you have had no tension in your life, never been screwed up by problems, your mortality well within your own grasp, and someone tells you that God so loved you that He gave His Son to die for you, nothing but good manners will keep you from being amused.

Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts,

The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable

Albert Camus

Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb.

Greg Child

Nobody can predict the future but it's worth trying to influence the direction.

Ron De Jonge

Even if I could, I wouldn't. Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.

J.K. Rowling

Do you know that other than my father, I've never had a man take care of me?

Dionne Warwick