"I have not skillFrom such a sharp and waspish word as "No"To pluck the sting."

“Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.”

“Comic-Con is a special kind of crazy.”

“For the arts epitomize, intensify and clarify the experience of beauty for us as nothing else can.”

“Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.”

“Until one feels the spirit of Christmas, there is no Christmas. All else is outward display so much tinsel and decorations. For it isn't the holly, it isn't the snow. It isn't the tree, nor the firelight's glow. It's the warmth that comes to the hearts of men when the Christmas spirit returns again.”

“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think.”

Source : "Why? New Eichmann Notes Try to Explain" by Roger Cohen, www.nytimes.com. August 13, 1999.

“Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its hum an rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you ? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made....”

“Am I an ego on legs? No I am not. Do I want to be seen out there all the time saying everything? No, I don't.”

Source : "Lady Ashton - once 'Lady who?', now the EU's diplomatic secret weapon" by Anne Perkins, www.theguardian.com. November 25, 2013.