'Greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.' -Ivan Boesky

Few Wall Street figures represent the excesses of the 1980s like Boesky, whose insider trading activities made him hundreds of millions of dollars before the SEC fined him $100 million, sent him to prison, and got him to turn in other illegal traders, such as Michael Milken.

In 1987, Oliver Stone immortalized Boesky's remark about greed through Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

'I've always wanted to be somebody. But I see now I should have been more specific.' -Jane Wagner

Wagner is a Peabody, Emmy Award-winning comedy writer and longtime partner of Lily Tomlin, with whom she has also worked extensively for over 30 years. She is probably best known for having written both The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe and 1981's The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Most recently, her 1997 documentary, Girls Like Us won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

'Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.' -Andy Grove

Hungarian-born American businessman Andy Grove's legacy as one of the most important players in the modern computing industry is set: he was the third-ever employee of Intel Corporation when the company was founded in 1968, and became its CEO in 1987. When he relinquished this role 11 years later, the semiconductor company's market value had soared 4,500%, from $18 billion to $197 billion.

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.' -Don Marquis

Marquis (pronounced mark'wis) was an American writer and humorist best known for two characters: Archy, a cockroach, and Mehitabel, a cat who was his best buddy. Marquis wrote 35 books in his career and was a regular columnist and contributor to The New York Tribune, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and a number of other major rags of the day.

'All history shows that the hand that cradles the rock has ruled the world, not the hand that rocks the cradle.' -Clare Boothe Luce

Luce was a major figure in 20th-century America. Her second marriage, to Henry Robinson Luce, the publisher of Time, Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated, put her into the center of New York's society circles, but she was also a journalist and dramatist, writing for the theater, for movies and for magazines. She also served in Congress as a House Representative from Connecticut, and in her later years, then-President Reagen awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

'She floats, she hesitates -- in a word, she's a woman.' -Jean Racine

Along with Moliere and Corneille, Racine is considered one of the "big three" French dramatists of the 17th century. A number of events forced him, at age 38, to denounce much of his previous work and (for the time being) retire from writing dramas, but he'd been sufficiently successful up to the point that he became one of the first French writers in history to live almost entirely off those earnings.

'Live with yourself; get to know how poorly furnished you are.' -Persius

As a young man, the Roman poet and stoic Aulus Persius Flaccus was by most accounts a loner who lived with or near to his family, giving him plenty of time to arrive at the quoted conclusion. He may have been looking inward when he jotted this down, having lived much of his years in utter devotion to the women in his life -- namely, his sister, his aunt, and especially his mother.

'The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins.' -L. Frank Baum

The Wizard of Oz never gets old, in part because of Baum's use of Joseph Campbell's so-called Monomyth, otherwise known as The Hero's Journey. Oz has all the elements: a hero is torn from ordinary life and thrown into a strange world from which he is forced to find his way home; along the way the hero meets a number of characters who teach him what he needs to know; he faces and overcomes various obstacles; and when he returns home, he's a changed man, the Hero. George Lucas is said to have followed The Hero's Journey to the letter when working on Star Wars, and the general blueprint can be seen in countless books, movies, and plays.

'Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.' -Matthew Arnold

The 19th century British writer was one of the most esteemed social and cultural critics of the Victorian era. He was certainly the era's most qualified man to comment and critique on society across England, thanks to his job as a school inspector: the job required him to ride the country's new railways all over England visiting a variety of schools, making him one of the most well-traveled men in the history of British letters

'The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.' -Napoleon

Napoleon wrote these words in February of 1814, three months after the disastrous Battle of Leipzig and less than two months before he would abdicate unconditionally to the Coalition forces and take up life on the island of Elba.

A year later, he was back in France in the Emperor's role, but four months later he lost at Waterloo, and another four months later he was exiled on Saint Helena, where he would die five years later, in 1821.