Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you, ” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

True friendhip is like sound health: the value of it is seldom know until it is lost.

Who's to say? Life is not, as we are taught, a matter of seeking answers, but rather learning which are the questions we should ask.

There's a set of rules out there somewhere that says it all ends by 40. I hope to be able to defy that because I truly love my work.

I would have given it up--all of it up--to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder--a reminder of everything I am losting. The Life I will not have.

The Iraqis sat down for talks on how to put together a post-war government. They would have sat down yesterday, but somebody stole all their couches.

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.

You are a wonderful son, and a wonderful man. Yet another parent busting forth with the “man” thing! I’d have to check my chest for signs of hair when I got home.

Making predictions is like throwing a dartboard at the fixture list

And that doesn't cost any money, to have decent relationships and viable situations. What costs money is car chases and shoot-outs, so I always thought that the thing to work on was the characters.