If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

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.

Biggest tragedy of life is when God ask us to glorify Him for our sakes but we choose to glorify self for satan's good.

A slice of bread eaten is a million times more nourishing than a loaf of bread imagined.

You gain strength courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.

We right now give $15 billion every year as subsidies to private insurers under the Medicare system. Doesn't work any better through the private insurers. They just skim off $15 billion.

I think it's great that they are getting funding, but it's just too easy. They don't have to work for it. We did it because we had pride, because we loved it.

Diplomacy should always be the first option, and every mission should have a clear, achievable objective that is in the interests of the United States.

People were so hockey-oriented, hockey-minded, without being too critical. In Montreal, they got downright nasty sometimes.

You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.

The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.