"I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN."

"Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it."

"There are very few innocent sentences in writing."

"This is water."

"She committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm."

"She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself."

"The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages."

"Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you."

"-the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer."

"That what appears to be egoism so often isn't."

"My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me."

"The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror."

"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." (Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)"

"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."

"Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book."

"If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds."

"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams"

"You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history."

"When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen."

"No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read." (The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)"

"The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know...do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough."

"You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture. You've got to become them." (Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)"

"I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love."

"You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition." Spoken by Abigail Adams"

"Only those who [do] nothing [make] no mistakes."

"If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio. WILBUR WRIGHT"

"How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?"

"The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it."

"Nobody ever lived in the past."

"All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others."

"No bird soars in a calm. WILBUR WRIGHT"

"The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write."

"It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required - learn vitally anything - by the close study of books."

"Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know."

"The past after all is only another name for someone else's present."

"I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene"

"We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better."

"Remove yourself, sir!"

"We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . . "

"The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” Signed Wilbur and Orville Wright, March 12, 1906."

"A leader must look and act the part."

"In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths."

"Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society."

"There are no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as Americans"

"As the Sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established"

"I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live."

"Vivez joyeux” was the old saying. “Live joyfully."

"A man who will steal for me will steal from me." Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing on the spot one of his best cowhands who was about to claim for his boss an unmarked animal."

"The only way to compose myself and collect my thoughts," he wrote in his diary,"is to set down at my table, place my diary before me, and take my pen into my hand."

"Because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished."