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I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

Thornton Wilder

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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Birds
Nonsense
Acknowledge
Innumerable
Burden
Inherited
Bird
Superstition
Must
Governed
Men
Govern
Superstitions

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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
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Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
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Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
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A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
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That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
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Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
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How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
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I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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