A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve.

The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

What's the use of inventing a better system as long as there just aren't enough folks with sense to go around?

perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.

He cared less, so they cared more. He said it was beautiful. I knew he was broken.This was his game.

I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.

Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts . . . and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.

Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism: but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.

Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me, it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.

We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.

I laughed all the way through Love Story.

I don't want to be the angry guy.

As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system-the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges-would take care of that; they didn't need his help.