On page 605, Blumenthal says that 'I made friends with Hitchens's friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.' True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited me to dinner with Dick Morris, but only on condition that I brought Rushdie (who was staying in my house) along with me. No Rushdie: no invitation. So I never did get to meet Dick Morris.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

John Ruskin

Israel is no longer a people that dwells alone, and has to join the global journey toward peace, reconciliation and international cooperation.

Yitzhak Rabin

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

They are the only people in the world who I can truly trust and rely on. Touring gets really lonely. I guess I have friends around me but when you're paying them can they ever really be true friends?

Kelly Osbourne

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

William Hazlitt

No truly great person ever thought themselves so.

William Hazlitt

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Claude Pepper

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

Leo Tolstoy

Chevy Chase and Bill Murray - we thought those guys were funny. We love Bill Murray, but we didn't think they were right for Airplane! because it would step on the joke if there was a known comedian.

David Zucker

People have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't really accept you as one of themselves? Surely they notice that you are different--notice the difference of accent?' etc., etc. As a matter of fact, a fair proportion of tramps, well over a quarter I should say, notice nothing of the kind. To begin with, many people have no ear for accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. I was often struck by this fact when I was begging at back doors. Some people were obviously surprised by my 'educated' accent, others completely failed to notice it; I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw. Again, tramps come from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents is enormous. A tramp is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his mates, some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand them, and a man from, say, Cardiff or Durham or Dublin does not necessarily know which of the south English accents is an 'educated' one. In any case men with 'educated' accents, though rare among tramps, are not unknown. But even when tramps are aware that you are of different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their attitude. From their point of view all that matters is that you, like themselves, are 'on the bum'. And in that world it is not done to ask too many questions. You can tell people the history of your life if you choose, and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation, but you are under no compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be accepted without question. Even a bishop could be at home among tramps if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed that he was genuinely destitute. Once you are in that world and seemingly of it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy...

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan

Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize.

Richard Feynman, Joking when ask

There is no try. There is only do.

John Green