There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it -- low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion -- and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals...

Leo Tolstoy

So when I go home, sometimes, even when I had an amazing game, I always think about what I missed.

Thierry Henry

Because beauty consits of it's own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.

Muriel Barbery

Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused.

William Ellery Channing

I was a quiet teenager, introverted, full of angst.

Nigella Lawson

The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny

Mark Twain

There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go.

Terry Pratchett

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

George Orwell

I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world?

William Morris

I just can't wait for the future.

Amanda Seyfried