“Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than to just be… safe. At least she knows she’s living.”

Did you ever see so many pee-wee hats, Carl?” “They’re beanies.” “They call them pee-wees in Brooklyn.” “But I’m not in Brooklyn.” “But you’re still a Brooklynite.”

It doesn’t take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.

Look at everything as though you are seeing it for the first time.

I’m from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.

you may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing

In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm the.

When you have learned, through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn.

We need an equal opportunity society, one in which government does not see its job as picking winners and losers. Where do you go if you want special favors?

Bad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right.

I think mine is a very rich life.

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again.

And always, there was the magic of learning things.

…the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only – the something different from anyone else in the two families.

It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life – the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.

You won’t die, Francie. You were born to lick this rotten life.

I’m a professor of national security studies, and I know a lot more about fighting than Rumsfeld does.

Things look different depending on your perspective. As I see it, fighting to bridge those gaps isn’t what really matters. The most important thing is to know them inside and out, as differences, and to understand why certain people are the way they are.

Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight

Where is the politician who has not promised to fight to the death for lower taxes- and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible?

Fun, fighting, and feeding! These are the three indispensable elements of the boy’s world.

This is what I tell, especially young women, fight the big fights. Don’t fight the little fight… Be the first one in, be the last one out. Do your homework, choose your battles. Don’t whine, and don’t be the one who complains about everything. Fight the big fight.

It’s not who wins the fight that’s important, it’s being willing to fight. If you get challenged and renege, everyone wants to take a shot at you.

No man can fight his way to the top and stay at the top without exercising the fullest measure of grit, courage, determination, resolution.