Leerleeft Quotes & Sayings

The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our
birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes
twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it
out of them. — Edward Abbey

The snow on their faces is so white that how the white patches on their faces, which once looked so white against their black, are a shade of yellow. — Lydia Davis

Suppose that we believe that in 200 years, people would be prepared to pay a million dollars (that's in today's dollars, not inflated ones) to be able to have an unspoilt valley. Now imagine that today we can profit by cutting down the forest in the valley, which will never regrow. If we apply an annual discount rate of 5 percent, compounded exponentially, how big would that profit have to be to justify the loss of a million dollars in 2210? The answer, surprisingly, is just sixty dollars! That's all that a million dollars in 200 years is worth, at that rate of discount. Obviously, then, if we use a 5 percent discount rate, values gained one thousand years in the future scarcely count at all. This is not because of any uncertainty about whether there will be human beings or other sentient creatures inhabiting this planet at that time, but merely because of the compounding effect of the rate of return on money invested now. — Peter Singer

Federal regulations forbid delaying inspections for fracture-critical bridges like the fallen Minneapolis bridge - the kind with a lack of redundancy in design, so that a single failure in a load-bearing part can cause the entire bridge to collapse. — Bill Dedman

Passions are like storms which, full of present mischief, serve to purify the atmosphere. — Andrew Michael Ramsay

I think any parent, at some time or other, has thoughts of their child dying. That's probably one of the worst things that could ever happen to a parent. — Henry Ian Cusick

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it. — Mohsin Hamid

What I'm sayin' is shit happens to couples. In any relationship there's ebbs and there's flows. You want that relationship to work, you put on your life jacket and ride it out. — Kristen Ashley

It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly, — Daniel J. Levitin

A leaders job is to shepherd, not necessarily to always shine. — Brad Lomenick

If we would succeed in works of the imagination, we must offer a mild morality in the midst of rigid manners; but where the manners are corrupt, we must consistently hold up to view an austere morality. — Madame De Stael

Always hear the 'Yes' in the 'No'. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

We live in a world of increasing dependence on electronic records and retrieval, unprecedented security and preservation concerns, and insufficient attention to civic and democratic education. — Allen Weinstein