Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't? What would you rather have in your garden--an almond tree or an oil well?

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that's the greatest human happiness.

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.

He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.

The loftiest in status are those who do not know their own status, and the most virtuous of them are those who do not know their own virtue.

Scars are reminders of the obstacles we've overcome. Wear them proudly.

The thing I don't understand about homosexuals is, how do they decide which one is the one who's supposed to pretend they don't want it?

Joy is our goal, our destiny. We cannot know who we are except in joy. Not knowing joy, we do not know ourselves.

Let me leap out of the frying-pan into the fire; or, out of God's blessing into the warm sun.

The answer to subversion of democracy is more democracy, more freedom, more justice.

I assure you that the world is not so amusing as we imagined.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction.