We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

Herman Melville

After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.

Marie Curie

This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.

Kurt Vonnegut

Your career is your business, and you are its CEO.

Andy Grove

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.

C.S. Lewis

Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he'd choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive.

Tom Robbins

And when I breathed, my breath was lightning.

Black Elk

And the truth is, those who are terrorists only have to succeed once, and those of us who are trying to build an inclusive society have to succeed every time.

David Miliband

Old people love to give good advice; it compensates them for their inability to set a bad example.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

That's the thing about pain, Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. It demands to be felt.

John Green

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

Ezra Pound

There are more fools among buyers than among sellers.

Proverb