Editors From The United States

"The trouble in the world is nearly all due to the fact that one-half of the people are men, and the other half women."

"Abusing the prosperous in order to curry the favor of the envious, is an old game that still works better than it should."

"However disagreeable a situation is to you, you cannot get rid of it by indignation."

"Automobiles are like people: the cheap ones are noisy."

"No man knows where his business ends and his neighbor's begins."

"A man needs a friend not to flatter him, but to strengthen him at his weak points."

"One of the most difficult things in the world is to learn to take a hint easily."

"No man has all the wisdom in the world; everyone has some."

"Every man has a long list of things that should be done, but which he knows can't be done. Yet he continues to talk about them as long as he lives."

"When a man is trying to sell you something, don't imagine he is that polite all the time."

"As a rule, you'll not have much trouble having your way, if you are right."

"Always remember that if a man knows where he can make a dollar, he will not tell you about it; he will go after it himself."

"Having fun is a dismal business after you pass fifty."

"People hate the man who is a constant drain on their sympathy."

"So many of the optimists in the world don't own a hundred dollars, and because of their optimism, never will."

"A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back."

"There is usually enough of everything on the table except cream."

"Men are virtuous because the women are; women are virtuous from necessity."

"The experience of the world is worth more than the experience of any one man."

"The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep."

"To want your own way is a very bad habit, for you will never get it."

"When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face."

"Silliness which would have broken a politician twenty years ago, now makes his fortune."

"We are now confronted with the necessity of remedying the remedies."

"When half the people believe one thing, and the other half another, it is usually safe to accept either opinion. The Democrats are as good as the Republicans, and the Catholics as good as the Protestants."

"The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century."

"I mean, if I'm in situations, and I just mean even at dinner or something, I'm with somebody, I'm usually curious, and the conversation will proceed with questions. And I guess it's also because I'm pretty interested in what anybody's doing, whoever I happen to be with."

"Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself as "B. Franklin, printer." From these attitudes spring what may be Franklin's most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class. Instinctively more comfortable with democracy than were his fellow founders, and devoid of the snobbery that later critics would feel toward his own shopkeeping values, he had faith in the wisdom of the common man and felt that a new nation would draw its strength from what he called "the middling people." Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens."

"For Einstein, as for most people, a belief in something larger than himself became a defining sentiment. It produced in him an admixture of confidence and humility that was leavened by a sweet simplicity. Given his proclivity toward being self-centered, these were welcome graces. Along with his humor and self-awareness, they helped him to avoid the pretense and pomposity that could have afflicted the most famous mind in the world. His religious feelings of awe and humidity also informed his sense of social justice. It impelled him to cringe at trappings of hierarchy or class distinction, to eschew excess consumption and materialism, and to dedicate himself to efforts on behalf of refugees and the oppressed."

"It certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood"

"Leonardo was not always a giant. He made mistakes. He went off on tangents, literally, pursuing math problems that became time-sucking diversions. Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notably the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen paintings fully or mainly attributable to him. Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty-first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention-deficit disorder. One need not subscribe to the artist-as-troubled-genius trope to believe we are fortunate that Leonardo was left to his own devices to slay his demons while conjuring up his dragons."

"The activity of rooting for baseball and other sports teams is one of the strongest expressions of community remaining in our society."

"Consider for instance, the facts that Jose Canseco was picked in the fifteenth round of the amateur draft, Roger Clemens the twelfth, Ryne Sandberg the twentieth, and Nolan Ryan the tenth."

"Before becoming governor, Nelson Rockefeller offered to buy the Dodgers to keep them in New York."

"Baseball performance is an outcome of opposing forces."

"How is it that the average CEO in Japan receives an annual income of $300,000 while the average CEO in the United States earns $2.8 million?"

"Nobody ever said that capitalism guarantees profit."

"It is well to recall that in 112 years of major league baseball, there has been only one bankruptcy filing."

"The first baseball game ever televised was a battle for fourth place in the Ivy League between Columbia and Princeton on May 17, 1939."

"While Babe Ruth's $80,000 in 1930 was eighty times the average U.S. income, Don Mattingly's $3.4 million in 1991 was 160 times the average."

"With today's high salaries, long term contracts, and corporate penetration of the ownership ranks, it is commonplace to hear commentators rue baseball's growing commercialization, claiming it is undermining the aesthetics and competitive spirit of the game. In fact baseball's growing commercialism has been a constant since the 1860s."

"Perhaps if movie theaters also played the national anthem before their main attractions, the Internal Revenue Service would allow Hollywood studios to depreciate their actors."

"Baseball's owners must be the only U.S. citizens whose parents never told them the story of the boy who cried wolf. Their perennial cry of evaporating profits and imminent catastrophe in the presence of rapidly growing revenues and escalating franchise values is hard to take seriously."

"Baseballs exemption from antitrust statutes, based on the notion that it was not involved in interstate commerce, erroneous back in 1922 and more so in the 1950s, became even more anomalous in 1957, when the Supreme Court declared football to be subject to the antitrust statutes and stated that baseball's exemption was "unreasonable, illogical and inconsistent.""

"Baseball's popularity and, more so, it's revenues continue to increase."

"It is true that I described antisocial, parsimonious, sanctimonious, and wasteful behavior by the owners over the years, but baseball's problem is structural, not individual. Put any individual into a position of power with an opportunity to make tens of millions of dollars in an industry that is on a cultural pedestal and protected from all forms of competition, and the odds are against the second coming of Lee Iacocca or Ralph Nader."

"Between 1903 and 1991 the value of the Yankees appreciated at a compound annual rate of 11.4 percent."

"Some owners are competent, effective business people who care about the game. Many others do not share these attributes."

"You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into entertainment."

"Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good."