Make This Stuff Up

A Jewish financier rips off millions of dollars devoted to memorializing the Holocaust--who could make this stuff up? Dickens, Balzac, Trollope and, for that matter, even Mel Brooks might be appalled.
--Frank Rich

Someone Is Watching

A deregulated environment encourages gambling and, eventually, criminality. Regulations inhibit the impulse to see what can be gotten away with. They remind the players that someone is watching.
--Jane Smiley

Always

Always be sincere, even when you don't mean it.
--Irene Peter

Before I Was Born

I did not find the world desolate when I entered, and as my fathers planted before I was born, so do I plant for those who will come after me.
--Talmud

Tell the Stories

Some say that children learn to speak in order to tell the stories already in them.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Unused

Many of our troubles arise from faculties unused.
--A.C. Benson

Forced Pleasantries

There's something in the alone-in-the-crowdness of the holiday party circuit, the forced pleasantries and laughter, the charge to be friendly and engaging--but only in a trivial and superficial way--that is very much like the existential condition of the alcoholic psyche.
--Jim Atkinson

Hope Alone

The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it.
--Harvey Milk

As If

I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference.
--Philip Pullman

Is To

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
--Henri Louis Bergson

Get Over It

America is having a period where we are redefining our mental picture of what an "American" is. In the mid 19th century, we had to mentally adjust to including Germans and Irish. In the late 19th and early 20th century, we struggled with mentally including Eastern and Southern Europeans, mostly Catholics and Jews, in the mix. Now it's Muslims and Asians. We'll get over it.
--Ciocia

Saves a Ton

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
--H. H. Munro (Saki)

Desire to Know It

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
--Sir William Haley

Such a Wonderful Thing

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.
--Lane Kirkland

Mother

Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That's all she is.
--Rob Watson

Only Abnormality

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

--Anais Nin