The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all. – Leo Rosten
I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. – Leo Rosten
Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable. – Leo Rosten
Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers. – Leo Rosten
As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958