Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.
Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.
Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - a house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Of course, I'd like to earn Jonathan Ross's money, but I don't have sleepless nights wondering when someone's going to knock on my door with sacks of cash.
A gourmet knows that the best part is not always the expensive part, and he will find that part, and then he will share it. A gourmet should want to share.
Trump very much wants to be liked by Putin and I think sincerely admires him. Putin doesn't know how to deal with somebody who positions himself like that.
There's something structurally integrated with foreign coverage. Reporters often default to thinking of their government as the sort of ultimate authority.
I've always liked the idea of walking into a cocktail party where there are different people and finding some connection with almost everybody in the room.
If, like me, you're interested in history, Egypt is a place of wonders. It's the land of many civilisations, including Greek, Roman, Christian, and Muslim.
Too often, when Muslim women speak out, some in our 'community' accuse us of 'making our men look bad' and of giving ammunition to right-wing Islamophobes.
It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion.
The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
I'm a mother, I'm a journalist, I'm an American; I'm all of those things, and it really complicates your job when you have all these things come into play.
If you know something damaging about a major political figure, then, in a democracy, it is surely your duty to tell the voters before they go to the polls.
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?
In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward.
Amin managed to invite both the US and Soviet ambassadors to his palace at the very same time and then deliberately kept them together in his waiting room.
I wanted to think about ways to get an American readership concerned with what is happening in Mexico, but also to reframe it as a problem Americans share.
AR-15s, in particular, are often called America's gun. They're some of the most popular rifles in the country, especially when it comes to sports shooting.
People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We've heard about a lot - doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness.
By the age of 18, the average American has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television, most of them occurring during Game 1 of an NHL playoff series.
The iPhone calendar isn't bad, but it isn't great, either. It only offers a day view and a month view - it doesn't have a week view, which drives me crazy.
Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
Mr. Obama still has time to reverse course. A great deal depends on it. To fail on health care yet again might well be the 'Waterloo' Republicans dream of.
It is ironic that American women now need to be fortified by the inspiration of the women of the Arab Spring, who risked so much to win basic human rights.
Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
Man is a being of a mixed nature; and, as there is no integrity without its flaws, so is there no man so knavish but that in some things he may be trusted.
Folks in the bottom half of the economy are already squeezed hard. They will be bloodied and bankrupt if economic policy inadvertently induces a recession.
After the Beatles and Dylan, there's this assumption that you are a singer-songwriter, or that if someone else is writing your rhymes, you're a fake rapper.
We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature, and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.
PLEBEIAN, n. An ancient Roman who in the blood of his country stained nothing but his hands. Distinguished from the Patrician, who was a saturated solution.
In short: Readily available low-cost life insurance would be a threat to the industry, and whatever threatens the life insurance industry threatens America.
Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.
Michel Gondry's 'Green Hornet' was another franchise flick that felt like it came out of left field - I thought in a good way, but most audiences disagreed.
The North Korean landscape is strikingly beautiful in places. It could be said to resemble America's Pacific Northwest - but substantially drained of color.
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
In so many of the other beats these days, there are these layers of public relations people that you have to go through to get to the newsmakers themselves.
There may yet be another Watergate book. I have thought a book about the aftermath of Watergate and its impact could be done, perhaps by me or someone else.
The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.
Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
In America today, if your sensibilities are offended by something that has happened, you get an enormous amount of credibility and are taken very seriously.
I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job it'll even see the light of air, if the experience of my network colleagues is anything to go by.
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.
It is the '94 race which in many ways allowed Ted Kennedy to become his own man rather than the 'third brother.' He had to reach down and win it on his own.
I have gotten into a lot of trouble in my life for being brutally honest. Sometimes I put both my feet in my mouth. But like Elton John, I'm still standing.
Can a president who’s presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term?
I want us to continue to scale and grow over the coming years in education, professional development and employment to bring about change in people's lives.
The romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes - the boys of summer - is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball.
It was a time of uncommon possibility and freedom, when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things. But life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable.