Edward Steichen

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.

Every ten years a man should give himself a good kick in the pants.

A good daguerreotype was as perfect a kind of photograph as was ever made.

I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

Ernest Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn . . .

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Courage is grace under pressure.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet — whom Plato banned from his Republic — may rise up to save us all.

Theodore Roosevelt

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

I have always been fond of the West African proverb "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

John Steinbeck

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

T. S. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities...

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

Voltaire

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbor's, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Bill Maher

If you think you have it tough, read history books.

I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.

Maybe every other American movie shouldn't be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.

The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs.

The tea baggers. The one thing they hate is when you call them racist. The other thing they hate is black people. But they won't say it.

We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.

Whenever the people are for gay marriage or medical marijuana or assisted suicide, suddenly the "will of the people" goes out the window.

H. G. Wells

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.