You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil.

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.

The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.

TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great.

Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North.

We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.

It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.

It was part of your religion to hate the British.

Reform is born of need, not pity.

The difference between a murderer and myself is only that I choose not to do it. But I'm capable.

My mother lived through the Great Depression. Her family of 11 children pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and moved to wherever there was work at the time. And in rural Oklahoma, that wasn't easy to find.

What drives me is really just being able to be a blessing to someone, you know. I really enjoy that, and as much as I can do, I will.

Live stand-up is my thing. I love being on stage and just messing around.

In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

Tyranny and anarchy are alike incompatible with freedom, security, and the enjoyment of opportunity.

Within the songwriting community, there are these unwritten rules for the way that a song should be written in country music, and I think that those rules are constantly being broken over the years, and the molds change and the process is evolving.

I train hard Monday to Friday. I'll do weights and cardio in the gym most mornings and do a spinning class, too.

Whatever that means, however you got on that mountain, why not try to climb it? And do it in your own way.

I feel like great TED Talks are ones that are a little bit subject to interpretation, that do provoke further conversation - and potentially controversy.

For gin in cruel sober truth supplies the fuel for flaming youth.

Art doesn't just happen by accident. It is about pulling out new tricks and trying new things.

Actors are smart. They have to feel safe enough to fall and to get back up. My job is to make sure they don't get hurt.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind but self love.

I'm always like this with a new movie role. I always get super-defensive and make noises like a rooster, Maybe that's because I spent so much time as a chorus girl.

Then certainly for a musician timing becomes something that is immediately accessible as a concept, because it's a necessity in ones everyday performance.

But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it's absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born.

I'm comfortable with being a voluptuous woman because I'm not going to be a size two and that's ok with me.

The No. 1 cause of burnout is doing the same thing over and over again and not seeing results.

I got tackled once in a movie theater. I was with my mom and brother, and then suddenly I got hit from behind and sort of sprawled out on the candy counter.

I never wanted to be the guy people looked at. I don't think of myself as being a celebrity; it's too mortifying.

In all, dozens upon dozens of groups and organizations have prioritized stopping the killing in Darfur before there is no one left to be killed. It is high time that we, the U.S. Congress, join our name to that list.

I'm from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.

New York is the great stone desert.