A book is the only immortality.

Its Constitution--the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.

Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.

I will look, your Honor, and endeavor to find a precedent, if you require it; though it would seem to be a pity that the Court should lose the honor of being the first to establish so just a rule.

There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop; there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed.

The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good.

We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution.

Anything more low, obscene, feculent, the manifold heaving's of history have not cast up. We shall come to the worship of onions, cats and things vermiculite.

We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and I keep step to the music of the Union.

Power, carried to extremes, is always liable to reaction.

Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.

We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.

I wish I could have 25,000 years of my personal family history documented in a very powerful computer or a CD-ROM that I could just pop in and my computer would never crash

I lead a very boring life.

How do you end a meditation session? It's nice to chant a mantra again. Maybe repeat it a few times. It seals the meditation. Do your best and then just give it to eternity.

I don't think it's good to try and change anyone. The trick and the mystery - of relationships and life in general - is to learn to live with the bits you don't like.

There has to be some certainty about who the leader is before the summer break.

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.

I was Little Miss Perfect. That's where all the secrets come in, because you know damn well you are not perfect, but you think your parents want you to be. And so you pretend.

We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.