Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.

An adaptation I was working on of Trollope's 'The Pallisers' has been axed by the BBC... I was also going to do Dickens' 'Dombey and Son' but they've asked me to do 'David Copperfield' instead.

May you and I run in such a way to receive the prize of gold when we run the race of passionate faith.

Life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen.

I've been playing baseball since I was four. I've got baseball in my blood. I love baseball.

Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Who taught you to hate yourself?

[Writing] is harder than you think. You'll be rejected often. If you do it for money, you'll quit. Love it or don't do it.

Let necessity, and not your will, slay the enemy who fights against you.

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.