The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

I don't respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I have a tendency to... if I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot.

Woody Allen

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

E. L. Doctorow

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.

James Russell Lowell

It's been a hard time to celebrate, to come out with a smile. But I'm an American. Naomi asked me to come out to support other Americans, and here I am.

Angie Everhart

The independent girl is a person before whose wrath only the most rash dare stand, and, they, it must be confessed, with much fear and trembling.

Lou Henry Hoover

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs in another man, it is the key to that era.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I will prepare and some day my chance will come.

Abraham Lincoln

The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages ; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Bertrand Russell

Directing is a really kind of amazing thing, because you're helping others and, in the middle of that, you have to worry about yourself.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses.

Cato The Elder