Quotes

"A map says to you, read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not…I am the earth in the palm of your hand." – Beryl Markham, “West With The Night”

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage” – Anais Nin

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."  -- Alan Kay

"Free speech makes for successful democracies, and successful democracies are the best places to live on earth." -- FailingEnterpriseAdmin

"I believe that sex is the most beautiful, natural, and wholesome thing that money can buy." – Steve Martin

"As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live." – Paul Graham (www.PaulGraham.com)

"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up" – Muhammad Ali

"Never ask the barber if you need a haircut" – Mark Twain

"There is a line of self-made, iconoclastic, pragmatic, larger-than-life American Everymen that begins in the popular mind with Benjamin Franklin, and runs through Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and Harry Truman, but also shows up in such far-flung characters as Walt Whitman, Henry Ford, and Ernest Hemingway. They are the fresh-air paragons of democratic self-invention—the anti-phonies who tell it like it is and, with their grassroots words and ways, rebuke the pretentious sophistication of Europeanized elites. Even when they hold liberal political views, they sometimes come off as reactionary cornballs, because of the way they extend our native mythology of salty, slightly cranky individualism.

Warren Buffett, as much as anyone else alive right now, belongs to this indispensable tradition of truth-telling Americans so square and forthright that they end up seeming subversive." – Walter Kirn The Atlantic Monthly 2004-11

"Traveling alone rocks.  You can eat when you're hungry, nap whenever you're tired, see whatever you want to see when you want to see it, and meet whoever you want simply by asking them to take your picture." -- Mike W. Miller, 35, Chicago, in Esquire, 2005-01

"The only thing I ever got from doing free work was an opportunity to do more free work." -- Barry Friedman, 47, Tulsa, in Esquire, 2005-01.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."—Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations

"If you have a yes man working for you, one of you is redundant." -- Colin Powell

“He travels the fastest who travels alone” – Kipling

"Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth." -- Launegayer's Axiom

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

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