• I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's

(William Blake)

• It requires a very unusual mind to make an analysis of the obvious

(Alfred Whitehead)

• Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know

(Earnest Hemingway)

• Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything

(Robert Rubin)

• I know that I know nothing

(Socrates)

• I would have written you a short letter but i didn't have time

(Pascal)

• Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favour

(Robert Frost)

• The opportunity for brotherhood presents itself every time you meet a human being

(Jane Wyman)

• To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it

(GK Chesterton)

• The truth is rarely pure and never simple

(Oscar Wilde)

• The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes

(Marcel Proust)

• Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility

(James Thurber)

• Cruelty is a lack of imagination

(Richard Eyre)

• True friendship is self-love at second hand

(Hazlitt)

• The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said

(Peter Drucker)

• Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine

(Fran Leboitz)

• Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils

(Louis Berlioz)

• A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

(JM Keynes)

• The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat

(Lily Tomlin)

• I have always known life was absurb. Life is nothing but a series of sensations. Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary. I think of life as meaningless and yet it excites me. I always think that something marvellous is about to happen. How can I trap this transient thing?

(Francis Bacon)

• Discretion in speech is more than eloquence

(Sir Francis Bacon)

• A socialist is more interested in re-distributing wealth than generating it

(Christopher Wood)

• There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one the best, sometimes the other

(Anthony Powell)

• All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same furies, are at close range equally extraordinary

(Anthony Powell)

• In good writing, the whole history of literature is at play, but it's being actively transformed into something with real immediacy, and that immediacy doesn't have to be complex

(Tom McCarthy)

• Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand

(Kurt Vonnegut)

• I could prove God statistically

(George Gallup)

• For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

(Thomas Paine)

• We shoot our wounded, we eat our young

(Brad Hinz - Lehman Bros CFO to 1999)