People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

Henry Fuseli

From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.

Tony Campolo

Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.

Raymond Chandler

If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don't, you're as dumb as he is.

Arnold Rothstein

Opportunity expands when there is excellence and choice in education, when taxes are lowered, when every citizen has affordable, portable health insurance and when constitutional freedoms are preserved.

Mitt Romney

I guess the nicest thing about being, I won't say famous but being popular is a more proper word for me to use would be that if you've got a recognizable name, a lot of times you can get people to do things for you ordinarily that you wouldn't get done.

Mickey Gilley

The ages of seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.

Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

Walter Pater

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty d--n good.

Woody Allen

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough and... it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Robert Frost

We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.

Samuel Gompers