The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don't do it. I have been out there. It is a mess....

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Live each day to the fullness, live the life that you imagine.

I have never met anyone who gave back a heart they stole.

Like Hollywood movies, MTV and blue jeans, fast food has become one of America's major cultural exports.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

For now, I only wish to make a simple acknowledgement of the woman who held the power just before me. Of all of us who touched it, I feel she was the most worthy.

Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.

but paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy. Rumer Godden found in Power of Simple Living by Ellyn Sanna

What the commission that myself and Leon Panetta is trying to do is analyze this in two respects. First of all, what's the right military response and security response?