A great philosopher has stated that the worst evil of poverty is, that it makes folks ridiculous; by which, I hope, he only means that, as in the above case, it places them in incongruous positions.
Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some imperative need of its own, which shapes its individuality.
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
Passion is all but soft, it's not tender, it's violence to which you get hooked by pleasure.
It is true that a population which is growing older needs to save, but the question is in what form the savings are made.
From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books.
Rather, I believe that it is very good, if, with the aid of his songs, we can be reminded, among other things, of the social conditions under which Schubert had to work.
There is too much blind partisanship in Congress, which has blocked progress on critical issues. Too many members view compromise as weakness rather than the essence of our democracy. This has to end.
All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.
I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.
I bought a car, but not just any car; I bought a Volvo, which was the safest on the road at the time. It's not any more, so I upgraded to the Mercedes.
As fears about the energy and environmental crises reach a fever pitch, we're all searching for solutions. And one possibility is that we could fix everything if we'd just shrink our population back down to about 2 billion people - which would put us roughly where we were at 80 years ago.
I think women are taking charge of the origins of a production, which is the most important part. Because you can't be a victim of whatever people ask you to do.
There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.
Melania rarely wears American labels, with the exception of Ralph Lauren, who created a duplication of a Jackie Kennedy look, which was basically a costume anyway.
I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.
That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
We have long possessed the art of war and the science of war, which have been evolved in the minutest detail.
What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense.
When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe.
The race problem in the United States is the type of unpleasant problem which we would rather do without but which refuses to be buried.
Narciso Rodriguez was my first fashion big brother. He made my wedding dress, which was wonderful.
The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.
I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
I like vocabulary and I actually read a book called 'Word Freak,' which is about a guy who basically went into competitive Scrabble for a year. But having a big vocabulary and being good at Scrabble are not the same thing.
Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.
When I started walking and I looked down and I saw on the floor this water, which looked like, you know, water in your basement except it happened to be in the auxiliary building of a nuclear power plant.
The history of our country is not the history of any other country in the world which is either practicing advanced democracy or struggling to lay the foundation for democracy.
In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side, stricken men await the verdict of fate.
I grew up in an inner city neighborhood called the Benson Hurst section of Brooklyn, which was a very embracing, warm, family-type neighborhood.
I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler.
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.
If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.
A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.
