One day when I was like 9, I heard the Beatles on the radio, and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world, and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order, and I listened to them - and only them - until I was probably in high school.

Don't stand shivering upon the bank; plunge in at once, and have it over.

Sam Slick

I think that every state in the union should recognize same-sex marriage.

Cass Sunstein

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

Don’t look for your dreams to become true; look to become true to your dreams.

Michael Bernard Beckwith

When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.

Tammy Bruce

A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.

Victor Hugo

For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).

Douglas Hofstadter

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man

Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Humph!' grunted Mr. Romford, seeing his worst fears about to be realized. He had dreamt that he had timbled over a poodle in the drawing-room, and squirted a bottle of porter right into a lady's face. 'Who's goin' besides ourselves?' asked Romford, wishing to know the worst at once. 'Better be killed than frightened to death,' thought he.

Robert Smith Surtees, Mr. Facey

People write negatives things, cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them, doesn't sell.

Michael Jackson

If we became students of Malcolm X, we would not have young black men out there killing each other like they're killing each other now. Young black men would not be impregnating young black women at the rate going on now. We'd not have the drugs we have now, or the alcoholism.

Spike Lee

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

Norman Douglas