We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

When we inform, we lead from strength; when we communicate, we lead from weakness—and it is precisely this confession of mortality that engages the ears, heads and hearts of those we want to enlist as allies in a common cause.

All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'

The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.