Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.
Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.
As a columnist, I realize that whatever amount of corruption I expose, half my readers will block it out, although they may get a frisson of joy in the process.
I see bright kids trapped in public schools that are just warehousing them. As an educator this makes me scared. As Secretary of State, this makes me terrified.
Child welfare ought really to cover all sorts of topics, such as better water and sanitation and good roads, and clean streets and public parks and playgrounds.
I work for a big newspaper, and I guess I'm an insider. I don't have the luxury of calling myself a foreign correspondent and just swooping in and then leaving.
The election of the nationalist Chen Shui-bian as president in 2000 and his re-election in 2004 was a nadir in the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland.
It doesn't seem to matter how often vaccines are proved safe or supplements are shown to offer nothing of value. When people don't like facts, they ignore them.
I remember an interview so terrible with CNN's Jon Klein, I nearly blurted out, 'Forget it, I am a loser!' But I didn't need to say it. My face and posture did.
I believe America went wrong in terms of respecting the First Amendment, the state of free speech on American college campuses and on the media and in academia.
Some people did take the domestic goddess title literally rather than ironically. It was about the pleasures of feeling like one rather than actually being one.
One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older. I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks.
Laughter serves as a blocking agent. Like a bullet-proof vest, it may help protect you against the ravages of negative emotions that can assault you in disease.
Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force.
What is it about this ideological dream of the right to bear arms that overrides any other rights, I mean the rights to not have your children killed at school?
Obama still has work to do with the vision thing. Convincing voters that he has a credible, practical plan to turn the nation around is a process, not a speech.
Close elections tend to break toward the challenger because undecided voters - having held out so long against the incumbent - are by nature looking for change.
The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.
As novices, we think we're entirely responsible for the way people treat us. I have long since learned that we are responsible only for the way we treat people.
When I was editor of the Erotic Review I fielded endless phone calls from elderly readers who thought I might like to pop round in my spare time and thrash them
Most countries want to bring their people together and tear down physical, commercial and cultural barriers. Anyone who proposes separating them is out of line.
The roots of Silicon Valley are full of stories of immigrants and minority groups who experienced bigotry and made it anyway. Why should women be any different?
Good psych should take you to a different place, be a bit disorientating and have the ability to make you wonder and perhaps make you feel the need to sit down.
Around us, we do see attempts to delegitimize Israel, a sort of secret, hidden anti-Semitism growing in many countries, often on the right but also on the left.
To make a Frankenstein monster of a complex character like Stalin would have been too simplistic. I wanted to show who he was and, if you like, how he happened.
The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying.
Basically all the world's computer parts come from the same supply chain that runs from Korea, down through coastal China, over to Taiwan, and down to Malaysia.
When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'
When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.
In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.
John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment.
I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.
The first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world.
I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family.
The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the "best" sources.
The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.
My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.
Soundness of understanding is connected with freedom of enquiry; consequently, opinion should, as far as public security will admit, be exempted from restraint.
Was ever a great discovery prosecuted or an important benefit conferred upon the human race by him who was incapable of standing and thinking and feeling alone?
A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department.
Now I tell everyone, 'Just become a mom if you can' - it is so amazing, and God answers all your prayers, and all those things that you worry about don't matter.
It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America's vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in themselves and their institutions.
I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don't cook very much. I love kitchens.
Politics was his passion, but he wasn't suited for the rough-and-tumble of the game. He felt things too deeply. There was no wall between his head and his heart.
I think you tell the story that has to be told. You tell the story that's the truth. You tell the story that readers will be interested in and should know about.
Wall Street's biggest fight with Obama was over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in the summer of 2010.
Games were moved to New Year's Eve as part of a plan by college football executives where they want to create a tradition of watching football on New Year's Eve.
New Year's Day probably is not going to work. And one of the main reasons it's not going to work is that the Rose Bowl is on New Year's Day, and it's not moving.
How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.