A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character. A good style cannot come from a bad undisciplined character.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

It is what you think it is that makes it so, and not necessarily what it really is.

Social hierarchy doesn’t hold a candle to the power of feeling isolated in your own skin.

Habit if not resisted soon becomes necessity.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical

Every time you have a desire come true, some part of you realizes it did not have to live in limitation.

Without appreciation and respect for other people, true leadership becomes ineffective, if not impossible.

That's when you know you know somebody. When you know every piece of clothing they have in their wardrobe. That's friendship.

Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.

I do sing about drinking, but it's in a party way. I don't sing about drinking in a drowning-my-sorrows way, like in George Jones's "If Drinking Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)."

I want to share the ballet world with everyone.