the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.

The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.

The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.

Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?

This alone is to be feared - the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.

Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.

A sense of humor is so handy, isn't it? It lets you see both sides of a question so that you never need do anything.

I am much perturbed by this business of sickness. Our bodies seem so easily to leap into the saddle where our minds should be. People who are ill become changelings.

We each live in a private, distorted, individual world - stars turning in space, warmed for a moment by each other's light, then lost in infinite distance.

it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.

I am fierce for work. Without work I am nothing.

But I don't shut up and I don't die.I liveand fight, maddeningthose who rule my country.For if I liveI fight, and if I fightI contribute to the dawn.

Every individual alive today, even the very highest, is to be derived in an unbroken line from the first and lowest forms.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was indeed a vital instrument of democracy, ensuring the integrity and reliability of a democratic process that we as a Country hold so dear.

Once I threw a water bottle from the stage into the audience, and it hit Tony Bennett in the head. It was a special moment for me.

I thought about going back to working at the gas station. I probably didn't like it at the time, but now it seems very romantic.

I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician.

It doesn't matter how much we know, it matters how clearly others can understand what we know.

Thy fatal shafts unerring move; I bow before thine altar, Love!

Different people work different ways.

It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.