When I was a kid, there were no credit cards. Instead, retailers offered layaway plans. My mom would go to a store, such as a furniture outlet, choose the sofa she wanted, and put it on layaway. That meant she put a little money down to hold the sofa...
I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of t...
These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: 'What do you do?' is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our per...
...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to t...
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
The longing to behold this pre-established harmony [of phenomena and theoretical principles] is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which has devoted himself ... The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind...
It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it w...
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The onl...
The best that has given us was likewise an exclusive production. If he had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. I do not hesitate to confess that to a cer...
The importance of for the development of modern physical theory and especially for the mathematical fundament of the theory of relativity is overwhelming indeed; also his achievement of the system of absolute measurement in the field of electromagnet...
If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation r...
We had a few tragic accidents in our state, as they've had in every state, from train crashes on down. And really, no text is worth dying for; that is our message to young people. And this is such a new phenomenon when you look at the number of texts...
When I was prosecutor we had truancy and curfew issues and we made a refrigerator magnet, and that was hot with parents. They loved putting it up on the wall and saying, you know, if you don't follow these rules, you could get prosecuted. Whether or ...
Not reforming the NHS would have been a much easier decision for me as secretary of state to have taken. We could have just protected the NHS from cuts, put in an extra £12.5bn and left it there. But sooner or later the cracks would have started t...
The early pictures of me you see online, in just T-shirts and hoodies - I'm still that guy with the hoodie. But what you don't get to see in most of those pics is that I had these red clogs on that had, like, eyeballs on the ends of them that I drew ...
That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commenced with error, ignorance...
I know what it's like to finish the laundry and to look in the basket five minutes later and it's full again. I know what it's like to pull all the groceries in, and see the teenagers run through, and all of a sudden, all of the groceries you just bo...
Mitt doesn't like to talk about how he has helped others because he sees it as a privilege, not a political talking point. And we're no different than the millions of Americans who quietly help their neighbors, their churches and their communities. T...
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. & It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of...
...happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves.... The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with v...
When I campaign with seniors, it's always, 'Are you a Democrat or Republican?' But when I campaign on college campuses, they ask me where I stand on specific issues. I think Millennials are much less interested in conventional labels. One thing that'...
