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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.

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
Administer
Endowed
Trained
Leadership
Public
Good
Love

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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
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The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
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A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
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We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
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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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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
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He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
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The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
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Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
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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.
Thornton Wilder