The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

Marshall McLuhan

Dedicate one's life to truth.

Juvenal

It is necessary; therefore, it is possible.

G. A. Borghese

It ain't sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any.

Mae West

Oh, the tree of life is growing where the spirit never dies And the bright light of salvation shines in dark and empty skies.

Bob Dylan

At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation if one may be blunt is for latecomers.

Christopher Hitchens

Let us not listen to those who think we ought to be angry with our enemies, and who believe this to be great and manly. Nothing is so praiseworthy, nothing so clearly shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men must necessarily be the active agents of their own well-being and well-doing... they themselves must in the very nature of things be their own best helpers.

Samuel Smiles

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naive, I feel!

Eddie Izzard

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Allen Ginsberg