Robert Hall

A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity.

We should be more anxious that our afflictions should benefit us than that they should be speedily removed from us.

Mankind are apt to be strongly prejudiced in favor of whatever is countenanced by antiquity, enforced by authority, and recommended by custom.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

When I see something that I think isn't right, I think I have some kind of, for right or wrong, an obligation to fix it.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.