There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air the punk rock movement made sense.

Like sheep which, having been driven to a pasture, can now spread out at their leisure, the clouds began to drift. Afternoon sunlight sliced through into the still waters. The boomerang hung in the sky, and the boy thought he would have to find a new word for the way the colours glowed. In the meantime, he looked down at the water and tried out the word he'd been taught by his grandfather, who'd been taught it by grandfather, and which had been kept for thousands of years for when it would been needed. It meant . It had, he thought, been well worth waiting for.

Terry Pratchett

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

John Ruskin

The owl of ignorance lays the egg of pride.

Proverb

My parents were what I like to call proper musical fans. Lots of Sondheim was played in the car.

Daniel Radcliffe

After puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious. . . . Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late.

Antonio Gramsci

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.

Sigmund Freud

Knowledge fills a large brain it merely inflates a small one.

Sydney J. Harris

Courage is what preserves our liberty, safety, life, and our homes and parents, our country and children. Courage comprises all things.

Plautus

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

William Shakespeare

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.

Christopher Hitchens

My dad calls me 'Mac' a lot, from 'Mike Tyson's Punch Out' - Little Mac is the main character. I was obsessed. I can still beat Mike Tyson on 'Punch Out.'

Mayer Hawthorne

Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

Jane Austen