Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet.

John Selden

According to the Small Business Administration, more than 70 percent of all family businesses do not survive through the second generation, and 8 percent do not make it to a third.

Kit Bond

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

Al Gore

Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works.

Alexander Dumas

A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.

Douglas Adams

People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?

Robert Wyatt

If you don't have a policeman to stop traffic and let you walk across the street like you are somebody, how are you going to know you are somebody?

John C. White

The minute a person whose word means a great deal to others dare to take the open-hearted and courageous way, many others follow.

Marian Anderson

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

Tim Berners-Lee

However, I had a chance encounter with an admissions officer of Stevens Institute of Technology, who so impressed me by his erudition and enthusiasm for the school that I changed course and entered Stevens Institute.

Frederick Reines

It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

John Ruskin

Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but--this is the essential point--generally persist from birth to death. 'Hence the anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. You find writers like Wells and Bennett who have grown immensely rich and have yet preserved intact their lower-middle-class Nonconformist prejudices; you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their aitches; you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the bricklayer's social superiors; you find board-school boys ruling Indian provinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below L200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the aitchless millionaire, though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and leams a B.B.C. accent, seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to. It is in fact very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan