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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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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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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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I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
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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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Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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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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All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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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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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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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
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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 condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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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