Niccolo Machiavelli

Friendships that are won by awards, and not by greatness and nobility of soul, although deserved, yet are not real, and cannot be depended upon in time of adversity.

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

If we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, and the third is useless.

Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions.

Whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise.

Steven Wright

I have a paper cut from writing my suicide note. It's a start . . .

A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths.

Babies don't need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach... it pisses me off! I'll go over to a little baby and say 'What are you doing here? You haven't worked a day in your life!'

Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.

Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?

Don't you hate when your hand falls asleep and you know it will be up all night.

Ever notice how irons have a setting for permanent press? I don't get it.

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.

How young can you die of old age?

I bought some batteries, but they weren't included.

I bought some instant water one time but I didn't know what to add to it.

I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.

I got a chain letter by fax. It's very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

I got this powdered water - now I don't know what to add.

I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.

I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out.

I had to stop driving my car for a while... the tires got dizzy.

I have an answering machine in my car. It says, I'm home now. But leave a message and I'll call when I'm out.

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Hunter S. Thompson

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

A word to the wise is infuriating.

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

Of all the men that have run for president in the twentieth century, only George McGovern truly understood what a monument America could be to the human race.

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer - he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Rodney Dangerfield

A homeless guy came up to me on the street, said he hadn't eaten in four days. I told him, "Man, I wish I had your willpower."

A girl phoned me the other day and said... 'Come on over, there's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home.

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he knows he can't.

I came from a real tough neighborhood. I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample it had an olive in it.

I found there was only one way to look thin: hang out with fat people.

I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

I saved a girl from being attacked last night. I controlled myself.

I told my dentist my teeth are going yellow. he told me to wear a brown tie.

I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous - everyone hasn't met me yet.

I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.

Georgia O'Keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me,so natural to my way of being and thinking.

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

Orson Welles

This theatre is your theatre. You are responsible for its creation and its progress.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

I have an unfortunate personality.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

Music is the universal language of mankind — poetry their universal pastime and delight.

Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.

Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done…

Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.

Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change
To something new, to something strange.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Johnny Depp

I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic or optimistic. I'm more realistic, I guess. But not cynical. I look. I watch.

Am I a romantic? I've seen 'Wuthering Heights' ten times. I'm a romantic.

Anything I've done up till May 27th 1999 was kind of an illusion, existing without living. My daughter, the birth of my daughter, gave me life.

As a teenager I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition too.

France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

I am doing things that are true to me. The only thing I have a problem with is being labeled.

I don't pretend to be captain weird. I just do what I do.

I guess I'm attracted to these off beat roles because my life has been a bit abnormal. The only thing I have a problem with is being labeled.

I'm an old-fashioned guy... I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.

I'm not sure I'm adult yet.

I'm shy, paranoid, whatever word you want to use. I hate fame. I've done everything I can to avoid it.

If there's any message to my work, it is ultimately that it's OK to be different, that it's good to be different, that we should question ourselves before we pass judgment on someone who looks different, behaves different, talks different, is a different color.

If you catch me saying 'I am a serious actor,' I beg you to slap me.

Charles de Gaulle

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends.

A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.

Deliberation is the work of many men. Action, of one alone.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own.

France cannot be France without greatness.

France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.

Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge.

I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?

It is not tolerable, it is not possible, that from so much death, so much sacrifice and ruin, so much heroism, a greater and better humanity shall not emerge.

Che Guevara

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.

I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.

I knew that the moment the great governing spirit strikes the blow to divide all humanity into just two opposing factions, I would be on the side of the common people.

One must harden without ever losing tenderness.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation.

I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, you are only going to kill a man.

The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.

Much more definitive and much more lasting than all the gold that one can accumulate is the gratitude of a people.

The people are weary of being oppressed, persecuted, exploited to the maximum.

Justice remains the tool of a few powerful interests; legal interpretations will continue to be made to suit the convenience of the oppressor powers.

This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers.