Pregnant women! They had that weird frisson, an aura of magic that combined awkwardly with an earthy sense of duty. Mundane, because they were nothing unique on the suburban streets; ethereal because their attention was ever somewhere else. Whatever you said was trivial. And they had that preciousness which they imposed wherever they went, compelling attention, constantly reminding you that they carried the future inside, its contours already drawn, but veiled, private, an inner secret.

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Jeremy Bentham

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

Kim Stanley Robinson

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

Ernest Hemingway

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Murphy's First Corollary If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.

George Edward Woodberry

My wife's got a face like a saint a Saint Bernard.

Rodney Dangerfield

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Raymond Chandler

To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.

Hannah Arendt

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

War has rules, mud wrestling has rules - politics has no rules.

Ross Perot

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Charles Simmons

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Henri Matisse

I think we need to ask serious questions about how we engage militarily, when we engage militarily, and on what basis we engage militarily. What kind of intelligence do we have to justify a military engagement?

Albert Wynn