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

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind. – 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
But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. The television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
