There's been a concerted effort to steal Christmas.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

P. J. O'Rourke

Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned, frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?

Billy Joel

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

Azar Nafisi

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The golden rule of business is supply and demand. I venture to say that this is also the rule of happiness. When a balance is achieved between our desires and another's willingness to satisfy them, the result is a sympathetic, mutually rewarding relationship. (...) a thriving economy of love.' - character Mike Lambeth

Caroline Adderson

We can no longer waste time and money. Every day, more than 2,000 girls in America, age 15-19, give birth - in the wealthiest, most educated nation in the world! Neither you nor I should accept this statistic.

Jane Fonda

The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.

Michael Faraday

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

Ben Kingsley

Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.

Nicholson Baker

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on...

Markus Zusak

Is this not the true romantic feeling not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Thomas Wolfe

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.

Thomas Henry Huxley