Lord Henry Harry Wotton Quotes & Sayings

In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed. — Masha Gessen

Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no guarantees from the world around us. — Richard Bach

Those who choose love - daring to feel to the depths of being, accepting responsibility for their actions, and seeking a purpose in life - will find that the world of significant living will unfold its cleverly concealed presence. — Barbara Marciniak

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record. — Smokey Robinson

'Piaf' I did it because I wanted to do more theater instead of only musicals, and someone gave me the book and said to me, 'You have to do it.' — Elena Roger

Since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light — Charles Bukowski

Indeed, this is what modern and postmodern masculinity has been all about-men behaving like little boys forever, serving themselves in the name of self-discovery. (Can we imagine someone like Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill talking about going on a quest to find his masculine self? They were too busy changing the world.) — Richard D. Phillips

The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal. — Karl A. Menninger

For a fifteen-year-old who doesn't even shave yet, you're sure carrying a lot of baggage around. — Haruki Murakami

For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc. — Roman Jakobson

Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not. — Steven Pinker

She made me act normal. Because I was. Because I could. She told me to breathe and sit up. And I did what she asked. Again. — E. Lockhart

Tempers were as short as the days. "Hungry bellies make angry hearts," as Birdsong liked to say. Tanglewhisker — Erin Hunter

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.

-Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue — Ariel Levy

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. — Oscar Wilde