The waste of life occasioned by trying to do too many things at once is appalling.

I would very much like to make Westerns. I love Westerns. I've worked on many Westerns in my youth, in Spain and here, and I love working on them.

John Landis

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

Michel de Montaigne

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)

Carl Sagan

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

Samuel Johnson

I never want to try to be a spokesperson for health and wellness because I most definitely am not the most in shape person in the world.

Ruben Studdard

[from ]For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.[...]The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: 'The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew...' and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist's deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.

Leo Tolstoy

Duty is the most sublime word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.

General Robert E. Lee

You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.

P. J. O'Rourke

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

Betty Friedan

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Richard Russo

The truth is .. I'm okay with people not liking me. I'm not okay with them pretending that they do. Keep it real. Everybody ain't for everybody.

Nakia R. Laushaul

Do not fear to be excentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Bertrand Russell