Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.

Christopher Hitchens

There will be no politics, no ifs and buts if we see something and feel that work needs to be done, we will get people here we can rely on and ensure it is done in the same thorough way as our other projects.

Ian Botham

The aim of morality is to give people a standard of action and a motive to work by which, they will not intensify each person's selfishness, but raise them up above it.

Cecil J. Sharpe

Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.

Suzanne Collins

He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Michel de Montaigne

Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.

Tom Landry

I've told Billy if I ever caught him cheating, I wouldn't kill him because I love his children and they need a dad. But I would beat him up. I know where all of his sports injuries are.

Angelina Jolie

I had Courtney Love's left bosom out of her dress on my plate in front of me. It was extraordinary. I didn't know where to look.

Hugh Grant

Illegal drug use runs contrary to the image of health depicted by cycling. Distributors of these drugs must be prosecuted more harshly as they are ciminals.

Bernard Hinault

Leadership is hard to define and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader.

Indra Nooyi

MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Oscar Wilde

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe