“Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitc...”

“As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it all men are created equal, except negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read all men are...”

“Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.”

“We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the inte...”

“I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.”

“One-time rival and subsequent usurper Secretary of State Seward finally settled into an assessment of Lincoln that, "His confidence and compassion increase every day.”

“Sometimes, insatiable curiosity and compassion are all that life requires of us.”

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”

“If spectacle is lacking in everyday life, it may be because we have forgotten where and how to look.”

“Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.”

“It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from meif much has been denied me, much,...”

“God's time is slow, patient, and kind and welcomes friendship; it is a way of being in the fullness of time that is not determined by productivity, success, or linear movements toward personal goal...”

“With a few exceptions, the media have phrased the past five months as a contest of wills between Bush and Saddam Hussein, not as a moment of deragement between two armed madmen willing to order the...”

“Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.”

“The mediastenographers to power.”