In our system leadership is by consent, not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

Julian Barnes

Most of our spending is done to forward our efforts to look like others.

Leo Tolstoy

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 18

Love is not only something you feel. It's something you do.

David Wilkerson

As a younger player, you always kind of play with that fear of failure.

Jason Giambi

If you have ever prayed for something and received what you wanted, you engaged in Cosmic Ordering.

Stephen Richards

Romance is the fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of things as they are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination.

Ambrose Bierce

In mid-life the man wants to see how irresistible he still is to younger women. How they turn their hearts to stone and more or less commit a murder of their marriage I just don't know, but they do.

Earl Warren

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Christopher Hitchens

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Mark Twain

If you must be mad, be it not for the things of the world. Be mad with the love of God.

Ramakrishna

My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.

Henry Louis Gates