One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tendto persist as the new bamboozles rise.)

Wait, wait,' he began, interrupting Oblonsky. 'Aristocratism, you say. But allow me to ask, what makes up this aristocratism of Vronsky or whoever else it may be - such aristocratism that I can be scorned? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don't. A man whose father crept out of nothing by wiliness, whose mother, God knows who she didn't have liaisons with... No, excuse me, but I consider myself an aristocrat and people like myself, who can point to three or four honest generations in their families' past, who had a high degree of education (talent and intelligence are another thing), and who never lowered themselves before anyone, never depended on anyone, as my father lived, and my grandfather. And I know many like that. You find it mean that I count the trees in the forest, while you give away thirty thousand to Ryabinin; but you'll have rent coming in and I don't know what else, while I won't, and so I value what I've inherited and worked for... We're the aristocrats, and not someone who can only exist on hand-outs from the mighty of this world and can be bought for twenty kopecks. 'But who are you attacking? I agree with you,' said Stepan Arkadyich sincerely and cheerfully, though he felt Levin included him among those who could be bought for twenty kopecks.

Leo Tolstoy

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Howard Nemerov

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

W. H. Auden

Technology has changed the way book publishing works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.

Bruce Jackson

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Steve Jobs

I don't believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.

J.K. Rowling

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream

Virginia Woolf

I have other obligations now - the show, my family, my life... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things.

Rob Lowe

I was once walking through the forest alone. A tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear a thing.

Steven Wright

'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, you have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.

Isaac Watts

I never dreamt of being a musician for my livelihood. I certainly never would have wanted to be in the business that I'm in, meaning the fame and the glory, the glitter, the rock star, the famous part.

Eddie Van Halen

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.

Melissa Leo