On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

Success has a simple formula: do your best, and people may like it.

Sam Ewing

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

Brian Eno

It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl, as opposed to some other, different kind. And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward.

Elena Kagan

Be content with what you are, and wish not change nor dread your last day, nor long for it.

Marcus Aurelius

Avarice, the spur of industry.

David Hume

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.

Laurette Taylor

If you would know the value of money try to borrow some.

Benjamin Franklin

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Revolution is a wasteful, destructive, and inhuman engine of political change. It must be allowed to happen if there is nothing better, but the great challenge to human ingenuity is to find alternative paths to economic and political reconstruction, which can bring basic changes without the massive use of violence. The societies of the- Third World can ill afford the economic and human costs of prolonged civil war. But virtually all of the thinking to date about revolutionizing underdeveloped societies through technology rather than through violence has been designed to serve the political interests of the donor country. The avoidance of revolution has been an end in itself, and very little commitment has been made to the achievement of radical political change through nonviolent means in societies needing revolution. A great nation has an inherent problem, and possibly an insoluble one, in devising a strategy for helping another society to remake its political life without injecting its own interests and values and without coming to dominate the weak.

Richard J. Barnet, Intervention

It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more.

Herman Hesse

I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray.

Seymoure Cray

To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton