"No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that they could vote themselves largesse from the public treasury."

“Meditation is the way we realize the nature of the mind.”

“Take one flower that you like and get lots of them. And don't try to 'arrange' them. It's surprisingly hard to do a flower arrangement the way a florist does one. Instead, bunch them all together or put them in a series of small vases all down the table.”

Source : "Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics". Q&A, www.washingtonpost.com. Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics.

“How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?”

“Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.”

“Sometimes I feel like the Tom Hanks character in Big. But my life is not a movie. I never have to go back to Coney Island to find the fortune-teller machine so I have to grow up again.”

“Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.”

Source : A Rhetoric of Public Bias: How Doctors Are Mislead About the Drugs They Prescribe, delivered September 2012

“I remember, when I was young, How easily my mood changed from sad to gay. ... But now that age comes, A moment of joy is harder and harder to get.”

Source : Bai Juyi, “The Chrysanthemums In The Eastern Garden”

“Saddam Hussein's regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also.”