As American productivity, once the exuberant engine of national wealth, has dipped to an embarrassingly uncompetitive low, Americans have shaken their heads: the country's old work ethic is dead.

Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th.

Leaders make things possible. Exceptional leaders make them inevitable.

Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.

People travel because it teaches them things they could learn no other way.

Never try to wear a hat that has more character than you do.

As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home.

Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.

Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

A thought can prompt. Words can stir. But it takes action to attain a dream.

You're not going to be immediately good at anything you do. You wouldn't quit on the first day of your new job, so why quit on the first try at doing something else?

Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

For me, I've always been one that reads a script and has been ready, wiling and able to go out and fight for parts.

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka- Seltzer into a glass- you don't see it, but somehow it does something

Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.

One doesn’t question a miracle.

Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

Live for today. Multitudes of people have failed to live for today.... What they have had within their grasp today they have missed entirely, because only the future has intrigued them.