People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.

At the age of three and a half the Taung Child was eaten by an eagle. The evidence is that damage marks to the eye sockets of the fossil are identical to marks made by modern eagles on modern monkeys as they rip out their eyes. Poor little Taung Child, shrieking on the wind as you were borne aloft by the aquiline fury, you would have found no comfort in your destined fame, two and a half million years on, as the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus.

Richard Dawkins

Where defining foreign policy as 'ethical' went wrong was that it implied that all decisions would be exclusive in every respect of any dealings with unethical regimes.

William Hague

The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success but they labor haphazardly at whatever they are assigned, building up with one hand to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty for turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough and ample time, the major ingredients of success, they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle and the real web of their life is never woven.

Og Mandino

You have something on your neck. What Looks like a bite mark, what were you doing out all night, anyway? Nothing. I went walking in the park. Tried to clear my head. And ran into a vampire What? No! I fell. On your neck?

Cassandra Clare

Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I'll give you a stock clerk.

J. C. (James Cash) Penney

It's such an amazing thing to be loved for who you are.

Debra Winger

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

Thomas Carlyle

A man is a god in ruins.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology.

Gavin Bryars

I operate from a place of delusion-that's what the Fame is all about... I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be - and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.

Lady Gaga

Economy is half the battle of life. It is not so hard to earn money as to spend it well.

C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

Dorothy L. Sayers