Presterest Quotes & Sayings

[It may be true that] men never know a pretty thing when they see it. [But men do] know a lady when they see one. — Louisa May Alcott

The superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops. — Confucius

Most people don't hold a job for 45 years. They pass on or want to retire. I don't want to retire. My real goal is to do 50 years on 'Sesame Street,' and I only got 4-and-a-half years to go. — Caroll Spinney

Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader-a dictator-willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing, to employ.' — Michael A. Ledeen

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it's said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow. — Valeria Luiselli