I always felt that I came up short in the education department but I've come to the conclusion that we all get an education.

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography 'Why Not the Best? ' published in 1975.

Dreams are by definition cursed with short life spans.

I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22 1963 the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.

I'm not really a fashion designer. I just love clothes. I've never been to design school. I can't sketch. I can't cut patterns and things. I can shorten things. I can make a dress out of a scarf.

Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.

We weep over the graves of infants and the little ones taken from us by death but an early grave may be the shortest way to heaven.

Without fullness of experience length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man no society will survive a shortage of women.

Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.