Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein's injunction to 'remember your humanity and forget the rest.' It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are 'fashionable,' it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.

Friends make pretence of following to the grave but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand.

Robert Frost

Judgment comes from experience and great judgment comes from bad experience.

Bob Packwood

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

Noam Chomsky

The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.

Humphry Davy

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Martin Luther King Jr.

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot

Mark Twain

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

Kitty Kelley

Nothing can atone for the lack of modesty; without which beauty is ungraceful and wit detestable.

Sir Richard Steele

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Robert Frost

If we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to his own place, in order, trying to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a good thing to be thus placed in order, that it is a good and pleasing arrangement in the room, this ordered and tranquil adjustment of theirs -- then their remaining in their places, quiet and silent, is the result of a species of lesson, not an imposition. To make them understand the idea, without calling their attention too forcibly to the practice, to have them assimilate a principle of collective order -- that is the important thing.

Maria Montessori

I think there is always a need for pure design. With pure design, you don't need so much decoration.

Jil Sander

Over the years with movies, I've given directors notes.

Harvey Weinstein