“...most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossils and wrote about botany and invented household tools and studied animals. He was an amateur anthropologist and even an amateur theologian who famously cut all the miracles out of the New Testament because he thought Jesus made a whole lot more sense without the supernatural material mucking up the good moral philosophy.”

“Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists--they're everywhere, they're all to eager to offer their services, and they're anything but gentle.”

“He disliked nearly all women and especially the young and pretty ones who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party the swallowers of slogans the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

“I’d known cruelty in a school—cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene—crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak—happened to be my personal trigger.”

“Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.”

“All men who run for presidency of the United States are amateurs; there is no way of becoming a professional at it, and all of them, win or lose, are forever altered in spirit of character by the ordeal.”