We are all excited by the love of praise, and the noblest are most influenced by glory.

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.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Mind can be your best friend or worst enemy.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.

All of them. Fated to love in vain.

One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.

Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.

Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.

This is the kind of work I've aspired to my whole career.