Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

Individuality is freedom lived.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.

I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

The memory is a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets.

Pause your opinions, debating and absolute knowing for long enough to conceive gratitude.

Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you're constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite.

As the Kindle's dread grip on digital publishing is challenged by tablet computers and Android smartphones, with their bright screens and high resolution, the need for illustration is growing.

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about "welfare mothers" - a code phrase for people of colour.

[people] very fact that it's decentralized makes it literally impossible to try to hack or rig the results.

You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?

Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth.

Inspiring visions rarely (I'm tempted to say never) include numbers.