I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don't confu...
There was love, a reliable and real love grown in a handful of days, and Tristan did not know why it was: friendship had happened to both of them, on the sudden, completely aside from Tristan's both endangering and saving Crissand's life. It was no r...
Herein lies the beauty of the flaw: that a shortcoming is a spiritual sign that says "Look! There is a perfect opportunity right here to grow and become better!" But instead of seeing those signs, people instead look and see something that is no long...
No man was born in chains; it is their fellow man who has put them in chains, and at any given time, every single man and woman has the absolute right to break free from those chains of any nature and of any form! It is not God who has put you in any...
The best love in the world, is the love of a man. The love of a man who came from your womb, the love of your son! I don't have a daughter, but maybe the love of a daughter is the best, too. I am first and foremost me, but right after that, I am a mo...
When the wildish woman has an idea, the friend or lover will never say, "Well, I don't know . . . sounds really dumb [grandiose, undoable, expensive, etc.] to me." A right friend will never say that. They might say instead . . . "I don't know if I un...
And now, as George pours the vodka (giving her a light one, to slow her down) and the Scotch (giving himself a heavier one, to catch up on), he begins to feel this utterly mysterious unsensational thing--not bliss, not ecstasy, not joy--just plain ha...
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and...
The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good, to do something to us or make us something. Hence the new name "leaders" for those who were once "rulers". We are left their subjects within their wards, pupils, or ...
The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be ...
Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas ...
You have a right to say no. Most of us have very weak and flaccid 'no' muscles. We feel guilty for saying no. We get ostracized and challenged for saying no, so we forget it's our choice. Your 'no' muscle has to be built up to get to a place where yo...
But now it’s too late. And that’s why, right at this moment, I feel so much hate. Toward myself. I deserve to be on this list. Because if I hadn’t been so afraid of everyone else, I might have told Hannah that someone cared. And Hannah might st...
We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to ...
President Obama is making the tough decisions to get our country going in the right direction, has taken our economy from job losses to 15 straight months of job gains, cut taxes 26 times, and focused like a laser on getting the middle class back on ...
It's important when you're married not to forget those things you used to do when you were trying to get her to marry you. You can't send flowers and buy gifts then, when you're married, say, 'Right, get my tea on'. That doesn't go down well. So you'...
Whatever you call me, my parents encouraged me to go to college and become a book lover, and to trust that I could do nearly anything if I could find the right book at the library. It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but t...
Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don't own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coerci...
Studies show: Intelligent girls are more depressed Because they know What the world is really like Don't think for a beat it makes it better When you sit her down and tell her Everything gonna be all right She knows in society she either is A devil o...
... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are ...
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same —“tro...