“A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.”

There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.

I was thought to be ‘stuck up.’ I wasn’t. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.

At 50, I thought proudly: Here we are, half century! Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black Afro wig, wore black clothes and hung a black wreath on my door.

Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night! – As Margo Channing in All About Eve

I work to stay alive.

I was never very interested in boys – and there were plenty of them – vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.

Success is built on disappointment, and disappointment is inherent in all success.

The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God’s joke on humanity. It is man’s last desperate stand at superintendency.

It’s true we don’t know what we’ve got until its gone, but we don’t know what we’ve been missing until it arrives. Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, Pain of love lasts a lifetime.

Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn’t do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.

The real actor – like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

I have been at war from the beginning. I’ve never looked back before. I’ve never had the time and it has always seemed so dangerous. To look back is to relax one’s vigil.

I never said anything that was unprintable. Never said anything just for the sake of being startling.

I survived because I was tougher than anybody else.

Your luck is how you treat people.

Among the reasons marriages fail, sex ranks no higher than fourth, behind money, having only one bathroom, and an inability to communicate, reasons one, two and three.

At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. For which service the senate, with complimentary resolutions, enrolled me in its order.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

Everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self-interest.