Natascha: But this is a democracy, Harvey... Harvey Dent: When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city. It wasn't considered an honor, it was considered a public service. Rachel Dawe...
Colin Sullivan: Hey, now why do you work for the state? Madolyn: Why not? You do. Colin Sullivan: No, what you do, the degrees and everything you got, you're hot shit. So why do you make as much as a guidance counselor? Madolyn: Because... I believe ...
Rhomann Dey: Peter Jason Quill. He's also known as Star-Lord. Nova Corps Officer: Who calls him that? Rhomann Dey: Himself, mostly. Wanted mostly on charges of minor assault, public intoxication and fraud... [Quill winds up his finger and flips the b...
Dirch Frode: What can you tell me about Blomkvist? Lisbeth Salander: Everything is in the report. Dirch Frode: The short version. Lisbeth Salander: Blomkvist got the nickname Kalle Blomkvist when he solved a bank robbery in the 80s. He's a very publi...
Mike Wallace: Am I missing something? John Harris: What do you mean, Mike? Mike Wallace: I mean, he's got a corporate secrecy agreement - give me a break! I mean, this is a public health issue! Like an unsafe airframe on a passenger jet or some compa...
[On the run from Roman soldiers, Brain lands on a public stage prophets. Brian quickly decides to disgues himself as one] Brian: [Unsure and stuttering] Don't... pass judgement... on other people, or you might be judged yourself. Passer-by: [as if sh...
Juror #3: That business before when that tall guy, what's-his-name, was trying to bait me? That doesn't prove anything. I'm a pretty excitable person. I mean, where does he come off calling me a public avenger, sadist and everything? Anyone in his ri...
America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for Ame...
At a time when we need an urgent national conversation about how schools and curriculum should address the environmental crisis, we're being told that the problems we need to focus on are teacher incompetence, government monopoly, and market competit...
Protectionist measures may permit domestic industries to thrive, which under free trade would wither in the face of cheap imports. Imports may be opposed by the government in the public interest--for example because it thinks it imprudent to rely upo...
Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] ... by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue...
I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though nothing but the report of it...
I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams' types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights with nothing but th...
[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want t...
In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they ...
What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Uni...
Occasionally, in the stillness of a taxi or an airplane, she would catalog the pleasures she had lost. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Strong mint toothpaste. Any food with hard edges or sharp corners that could pierce or abrade the inside of her mouth: pot...
When you meet someone so different from yourself, in a good way, you don't even have to kiss to have fireworks go off. It's like fireworks in your heart all the time. I always wondered, do opposites really attract? Now I know for sure they do. I'd gr...
As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is readi...
Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us and to make us more alive within ourselves. That, I suppose, is the final mystery a...
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a...
