I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

Money enables us to get what we want instead of what other people think we want.

George Bernard Shaw

Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbours, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition.

Thucydides

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Mark Twain

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Khalil Gibran

I am convinced that living in an enclave shapes the personality, and living alone shapes the personality too.

Mary Douglas

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Henry David Thoreau

Hope is a risk that must be run.

Georges Bernanos

Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Clinical experience has indicated that where a child has been exposed early in his live to episodes of physical violence, whether he himself is the victim or ... the witness, he will often later demonstrate similar outbursts of uncontrollable rage and violence of his own. Aggression becomes an easy outlet through which the child's frustrations and tensions flow, not just because of a simple matter of learning that can be just as simply unlearned, not just because he is imitating a bad behavior model and can be taught to imitate something more constructive, but because these traumatic experiences have overwhelmed him. His own emotional development is too immature to withstand the crippling inner effects of outer violence. Something happens to the child's character, to his sense of reality, to the development of his controls against impulses that may not later be changed easily but which may lead to reactions that in turn provoke more reactions - one or more of which may be criminal. Then society reacts against him for what he did, but more for what all of us have done - unpleasantly - to one another. Upon him is laid the iniquity of us all...

Karl Menninger, The Crime of Pun

Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.

Josh Radnor

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more liberal, and my father is increasingly conservative. It's so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents, I practically fell out of my chair.

Lauren Graham