I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them -- the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

Michael Levine

I care about the connection with the audience. Film is such a powerful medium. Movies can change the way people think.

Nicolas Cage

The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Moonlight is sculpture.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I installed a skylight in my apartment... the people who live above me are furious!

Steven Wright

It is up to us to give ourselves recognition. If we wait for it to come from others, we feel resentful when it doesn't, and when it does, we may well reject it.

Bernard Berkowitz

Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Lord Melbourne

Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.

Christopher Hitchens

For four years, I listened to stories of intelligence failures, and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system, but that the system is so arcane.

Charles F. Bass

Character is the impulse reined down into steady continuance.

Charles H. Parkhurst

As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.Tyson, Neil deGrasse; Avis Lang (2012-02-20). Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (Kindle Locations 1880-1882). Norton. Kindle Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

Henry David Thoreau