If someone tells you that you cannot do something and you believe it, they are right.
It’s almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington.
When you have a dream, you’ve got to grab it and never let go.
You have to have faith that there is a reason you go through certain things. I can’t say I’m glad to go through pain, but in a way, one must, in order to gain courage and really feel joy.
No one ever said life was fair. Just Eventful.
It’s also selfish because it makes you feel good when you help others. I’ve been helped by acts of kindness from strangers. That’s why we’re here, after all, to help others.
You have to go through the falling down in order to learn to walk. It helps to know that you can survive it. That’s an education in itself.
Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.
You do have to love your kids enough to let them hate you. But it’s the disease that’s hating you, not them.
I couldn’t get the laughter out of my head. It wasn’t career. It wasn’t even a choice. It was a calling.
Enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration,motivation, and a pinch of creativity.
We can create the ultimate job security by becoming less dependent on the organization for which we work and more dependent on our own resources.
I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, not manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation.
A dream collage is pictures of your goals. It is like your future photo album.
A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success.
The best way to lose a job is just not to care. When you do not care, it shows in everything you do.
Those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization.
Having a positive mental attitude is asking how something can be done rather than saying it can’t be done.
Every day, people settle for less than they deserve. They are only partially living or at best living a partial life. Every human being has the potential for greatness.
If you are going to ask yourself life-changing questions, be sure to do something with the answers.
You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.
Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.
Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.
It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.
Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’t interfere with.
He says, You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor , your shoes might be broken , but your mind is a palace.
If you were mean to your parents, they’d give you a good belt in the gob and send you flying across the room.
I don’t believe in happiness anyway… it’s too much of an American pastime, this search for happiness. Just forget happiness and enjoy your misery.
I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That’s what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.
Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.
Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.
Where there is authority, there is no freedom.
The hopeless don’t revolt, because revolution is an act of hope.
The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.
Think about the world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to build the world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.
Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.
Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.
True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
elf-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are willing victims to the spell.
Anyone can do the job when things are going right. In this business we play for keeps.
It’s remarkable how quickly a good and favorable wind can sweep away the maddening frustrations of shore living.
Rule books are paper – they will not cushion a sudden meeting of stone and metal.
Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
There is no more alluring airspace in the world than the slit up a China girl’s dress.
Nobody who gets too damned relaxed builds up much flying time.
MaCleod, since you’ve flown the SeaBee a lot you’ll understand when I say it was the only airplane I ever owned that you could put in a dive, loose a cylinder and stall out!
The emergencies you train for almost never happen. It’s the one you can’t train for that kills you.
Electronics were rascals, and they lay awake nights trying to find some way to screw you during the day. You could not reason with them. They had a brain and intestines, but no heart.
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Lying is done with words, and also with silence.
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.
What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is.
Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.
The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.
I know what I can know, and am not troubled about what I cannot know.
We do not act because we know, but we know because we are called upon to act; the practical reason is the root of all reason.
The person who doubts there is an external world does not need proof: he needs a cure.
A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.
Nothing is more destructive of individual character than for a man to lose all faith in his own abilities for the prosecution of his work.
By philosophy the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands.
I was really not a good student, and I felt that shame every day. That’s one of the reasons I started smoking pot and drinking daily.
If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.
A lot of the ways of advertising a book – the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore – those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.
I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.
America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards!
The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you’re going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell’s the point? Just do fiction.
My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist.
Everyone struggles. Each life comes with a long catalog of pain.
I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.
We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.
What isn’t said is as important as what is said.
Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.
Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.
You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.
