James Russell Lowell Quotes

Why should I be honored? Don't I have enough attention, comfort and power already?

In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It's also a psychological trap that can stop one's growth and allow one to get away with just plain bad behavior.

Titles of honor are like the impressions on coins, which add no value to gold or silver, but only render brass current.

How success changes the opinion of men!

Great men always pay deference to greater.

At a family's most difficult time, I want to make sure at a minimum that they have the very basic of comforts: the ability to grieve their loss privately and the knowledge that their country is grateful for their loved one's sacrifice and service.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

Your part can be the king, but unless people are treating you like royalty, you ain't no king, man.

A seat in the council is honor without profit.

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order.

For titles do not reflect honor on men, but rather men on their titles.

Titles were symbols, just as impressive buildings were symbols, except that titles, unlike buildings, cost nothing.

Titles and honor and salutes it is in the power of the supreme authority in many countries to bestow, and it is from no vain or childish instinct that the world in all ages has attached value to these emblems or rewards.

Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead.

Essentially, Louis XIV created exclusivity. If we look at how we live our lives today, many of us are members of clubs or gyms. We search out exclusivity. He created the world of fashion at Versailles.

As always, whenever I'm contacted by the White House, I'm just humbled.

When someone important to you, someone that's played a big role in your life, when they're gone... When you write about them or pay tribute to them, you want to do it in a way that's thoughtful.

Titles are what I crave.

All I want are titles and nothing less.

I touched Roger's bat and held it to my heart. My bat will lie next to his. I'm damn proud of that.

Maybe the best things about celebrity are the things like being able to get that seat on the plane that you wouldn't normally get, but that's kind of like cheating.

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was.

If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.

For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.