Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to man.
~ Leon Trotsky, in Diary In Exile
I never give them hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it is hell.
~ Harry Truman
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
~ Barbara W. Tuchman
When I am asked a question
Here is the way things go:
I give a lengthy answer
Before saying, “I don’t know.”
~ Joshua Adams
Our children are being raised by appliances.
~ Bill Moyers
We are becoming a nation of neither children nor adults. Rather we all exist in some age zone between childhood and adulthood. We’re a nation of adolescents – preoccupied with ourselves, sexualized, moody and impulsive, seeking freedom without responsibility.
~ Joshua Meyrowitz
Data isn’t information any more than fifty thousand tons of cement is a skyscraper.
~ Clifford Stoll
We’re falling out of the world of history into the world of demographics where we count everything and value nothing.
~ George W. S. Trow
A man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.
~ William Least Heat Moon
We search the world for truth: we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful
From graven stone and written scroll:
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our Mothers read.
~ John Greenleaf Whittier
