A few years ago I lost 30 pounds, and people still wanted to criticize. And honestly, I'm happy with myself if I'm a little heavier. I realized: 'Why am I trying to conform to someone else's idea of beauty?' I think I'm beautiful either way.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

John Stuart Mill

Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort ,is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.

Leo Tolstoy

Civil marriage, like all civil rights provided by the government, must be provided equally to all Americans.

Benjamin Todd Jealous

Courage is simply the willingness to be afraid and act anyway.

Robert Anthony

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

Kurt Vonnegut

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Raymond Chandler

You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God's dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd.

Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

Donna Tartt

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter

People are looking to have more meaning in their lives. It is a sign the technology community is coming of age.

John Doerr

Massachusetts children cannot only lead the nation in test scores, they can be competitive with the best in the world. And the gap in achievement among races can virtually disappear.

Mitt Romney

How much better a thing it is to be envied than to be pitied.

Herodotus