To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.

The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

We made too many wrong mistakes.

Freedom is saying I want to do this Not that

He had been kicked in the head by a mule when young and believed everything he read in the Sunday papers.

I find my past in my present, and from these forecast my future.

If you do a fifteen hour day on a film, there's a lot of time standing around but at the end of that, you want to go home to your hotel room and have a bite to eat, watch a movie and go to bed.

Enhancing long term national security requires that we have a clear-eyed view of radical Islamic terrorism without ascribing radical Islamic terrorist views to all Muslims.

There's a lot of funding of the media and film in particular, literary publishing gets recognized as culture. I think fashion should too.

Philanthropy can take the risks that others cannot or will not.

I did a lot of theater in the South side of Chicago.

Every person has his or her own vocation-talent is the call.