The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves

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?

Some things never change. Not the ABC’s, not the multiplication tables, not God!

Greatness is a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

I consider the 3 most cruelly produced foods to be from lobsters, dropped alive into boiling water, veal from calves separated from their mothers and kept in crates, and pate de foie gras.

The classic literature is always modern.

The wonder of immaculate, perfect, pure mind is that when it is in its perfect, extant state without confusion, it can be anything it wants to be.

I cannot imagine anyone being more of an outsider than the first woman president.

If you find something helpful to give you a hand, allow it to assist you, hands down!

Everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than one thing. We are born with it.

I have found that the key to being happy - well, one of the keys, anyway - is to be easily amused.