What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence. Jonathan Miller
What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials. Helen Frankenthaler
When a big company lays you off, they often give you a year's salary to 'go pursue a dream.' If you're stupid, you panic and get another job. If you're smart, you take the money and use the time to figure out what you want to do next. Bruce Scheneier
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. Samuel Butler
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic. Jean Rostand
When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so. Georg C. Lichtenberg
When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. Walter Lippmann
When I am in the Scottish Parliament chamber, I often feel the need to sit for the entire debate. It's only courteous to listen to what everyone has to say, although I often find myself desperate to say something but too scared to stand up in case I regret it. Margo MacDonald
When I interview people, and they give me an immediate answer, they're often not thinking. So I'm silent. I wait. Because they think they have to keep answering. And it's the second train of thought that's the better answer. Robin Leach
