Risk is essential. There is not growth of inspiration in staying within what is safe and comfortable. Once you find out what you do best, why not try something else?

The liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman.

Junius, The Letters of Junius 'D

Traveling is a fool's paradise... I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there besides me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

...it was always said of him Scrooge that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us

Charles Dickens

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Francis Bacon

Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness.

Cullen Hightower

The real test of good manners is to be able to put up with bad manners pleasantly.

Kahlil Gibran

I think somehow men understand other men's need for respect differently than they understand it for a woman. I'm disappointed to have to say that, but I think it's undeniably true.

Carly Fiorina

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors the living could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you your life?

Christopher Hitchens

What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.

Edward Dahlberg

They tell me, Lord, that when I seemTo be in speech with you.Since but one voice is heard, it

C.S. Lewis

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

Steven Soderbergh

The issues are the same. We wanted peace on earth, love, and understanding between everyone around the world. We have learned that change comes slowly.

Paul McCartney, 'Sayings of the