If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Woody Allen

I feel that I, and the people under my command, tried to use all the traditional methods of recruiting agents which were also used by other intelligence services adopting also means like pressure, money, sex - but that did not characterize my service.

Markus Wolf

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

Edwin Powell Hubble

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof -- that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

Aldous Huxley

When two men share an umbrella, both of them get wet.

Michael Isenberg

A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.

William Allen White

Perhaps it is music that will save the world.

Shinichi Suzuki

Revolution from above, in some states and cases, is [...] often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.

Christopher Hitchens

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Joseph Brodsky

For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.

Judy Garland

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebook E,

The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money.

Tom Hooper