Quotes worth reading

Some of you purists out there may be saying to yourselves, "It should be quotations worth reading. I, however, feel that this distinction is no longer being made and, if it is, it serves no real purpose. Even though I am a copy editor, I still am all for discarding outmoded conventions in writing (within reason, of course--I still refuse to say ain't, even though it is a word). Alphabetical order, on the other hand, has not lived out its usefulness, and that is the order in which you'll find these quotes. And remember, quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

This is not Bartlett's Quotations, nor does it attempt to be. It is simply a compilation of quotes that I find interesting, which, for the more psychologically-minded of you, may shed some light on my own personality. For over 13,000 more, go to QuoteWorld.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
--John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, First Baron Acton off Aldenham, professor, historian, and politician (1834-1902), Letter to Mandell Creighton, 1887

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
--Lord Acton, Letter to Mary Gladstone

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
--Lord Acton, Lecture

The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.
--Lord Acton

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
--Lord Acton

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
--Douglas Adams

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
--Franklin Pierce Adams, newspaper columnist and humoristt (1881-1960)

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
--John Quincy Adams, President of the United States, 18255-1829 (1767-1848)

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
--John Q. Adams

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
--Aesop

The Universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind--a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house.
--Woody Allen, author, actor, director (1935-)

Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.
--Woody Allen

Nothing sexier than a lapsed Catholic.
--Woody Allen

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
--Woody Allen, Without Feathers

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
--Woody Allen

My only regret in life is that I wasn't born someone else.
--Woody Allen

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
--Woody Allen

Ill-fated persons, their will is not firm! Or if it is firm, it cannot endure. They know the names of the Ones but cannot hold them. Or if they can hold them, they cannot be resolute. They boast and bluster but cannot constantly hold them. Therefore the Three Ones depart, and then the truth breath disappears.
--from The Method of Holding the Ones: A Taoist Manuall of Meditation of the 4^th Century A.D., trans. Poul Andersen

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.
--Maya Angelou

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
--Anonymous, author and humorist (4500000000 BCE-)

Women only have two complaints: Nothing to wear, and not enough closet space for it.
--Anonymous

If you hear no evil and see no evil, call the TV repairman.
--Anonymous

War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.
--Anonymous

By means of toil man shall scale the height,
Who to fame aspires mustn't sleep o' night.
Who seeketh pearl in the deep must dive,
Winning weal and wealth by his main and might.
And who seeketh Fame without toil and strife
Th' impossible seeketh and wasteth life.
--from 1001 Nights

Travel! And thou shalt find new friends for old ones left behind.
Toil! For the sweets of human life by toil and moil are found.
The stay-at-home no honor wins, nor aught attains but want,
So leave thy place of birth and wander all the world around!
I've seen, and very oft I've seen, how standing water stinks,
And only flowing sweetens it and trotting makes it sound.
And were the moon forever full and ne'er to wax or wane,
Man would not strain his watchful eyes to see its gladsome round.
Except the lion leave his lair, he ne'er would fell his game,
Except the arrow leave the bow, ne'er had it reached its bound.
Gold dust is dust the while it lies untraveled in the mine,
And aloes wood mere fuel is upon its native ground.
And gold shall win his highest worth when from his goal ungoaled,
And aloes sent to foreign parts grows costlier than gold.
--from 1001 Nights

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
--Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906)

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.
--Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)

Nature does nothing uselessly.
--Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not an act, but a habit.
--Aristotle

The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
--Alan Ashley-Pitt

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
--Isaac Asimov, scientist and prolific author (1920-92)

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
--Isaac Asimov

We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
--W. H. Auden

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.
--Saint Augustine (354-430)

The mind commands the body and the body obeys. The mind commands itself and finds resistance.
--St. Augustine

Amor magnus doctor est. (Love is a powerful teacher.)
--St. Augustine

Our life is what our thoughts make of it.
--Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and Roman emperor (121-1800 AD)

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.
--Jane Austen

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
--Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (15561-1626)

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
--Francis Bacon

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
--Francis Bacon

The ideas of an author after shaving are different from those he had before.
--Honore de Balzac, quoting Sterne in "Another Study of WWoman"

The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.
--John N. Bahcall, astrophysicist (1935-2005)

Coming up with new ways to point out the stupidity of Americans is probably the single most popular activity in the concerned-expert community. Just about every week you read a news story in which experts announce an alarming new study showing that seven out of every ten Americans don't know how many limbs they have, or cannot correctly identify their home planet.
--Dave Barry, humorist (1947-)

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
--Dave Barry

Never answer a critic, unless he's right.
--Bernard Baruch, financier and diplomat (1870-1965)

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
--Jacques Barzun, educator (1907-)

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
--Henry Ward Beecher

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, "Thus far and no farther."
--Ludwig van Beethoven, composer (1770-1827)

Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty.
--Jeremy Bentham, British philosopher, economist, jurist,, and social reformer (1748-1832)

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
--Jeremy Bentham

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
--Jeremy Bentham

Who is content with nothing possesses all things.
--Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, poet (1636-1711)

Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
--Erma Bombeck, humorist (1927-1996)

Guidelines for Bureaucrats: (1) When in charge ponder. (2) When in trouble delegate. (3) When in doubt mumble.
--James H. Boren

It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
--Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
--Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (1920-)

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"

"That's against the law!"

"Oh. Of course."
--Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant.
--Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, lawyer, judge, and writer (18566-1941)

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and the fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis

Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
--Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist (1930- )

Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of the billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things within that enormous immensity.
--Wernher von Braun, rocket engineer (1912-1977)

Every day people are straying from the church and going back to God.
--Lenny Bruce, comedian (1926-1966)

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."
--John Brunner, science fiction writer (1934-1995) [Brrunner is credited with introducing the idea of computer viruses in this book, The Shockwave Rider.]

...[F]rom the patronizing stage to the persecuting stage has always been a very short step.
--John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
--Bucy's Law

If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we would all be millionaires.
--Abigail Van Buren

The most favourable laws can do very little towards the happiness of people when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them.
--Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
--Edmund Burke

All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.
--Edmund Burke

The age of chivalry is dead; that of the... economists and calculators have succeeded.
--Edmund Burke

I'd rather be a failure in something that I love than a success in something that I don't.
--George Burns

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
--John Burroughs

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
--Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890)

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
--Thomas Carlyle

"Come, it's pleased so far," thought Alice, and she went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where--" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

--Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), mathematician and writer (1832-1898), Alice in Wonderland

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
--Lewis Carroll

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
--Pablo Casals, cellist (1876-1973)

Omnis tuus castra sunt inesse nos.
--Cats

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
--Dick Cavett

Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!
--Miguel de Cervantes, writer (1547-1616)

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
--Miguel de Cervantes

To know another language is to have a second soul.
--Charlemagne, King of the Franks (742-814)

It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
--Dick Cheney

To be clever enough to get all the money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
--G. K. Chesterton, writer (1874-1936)

Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.
--Chinese Proverb

The mind covers more ground than the heart but goes less far.
--Chinese Proverb

If I had to choose only one of all these quotes as my favorite, it would be this one:

In a capitalist economy the implication of the economy for the educational system is pretty straightforward. First, it will be organized as a public or privately profitable pursuit, with typical class structure for all the obvious and necessary reasons. And two, the economy needs graduates that fit the slots it offers people to fill and to operate within them effectively as the slots require. It doesn't want a graduating class none of whose members, for example, could put up with totally boring and alienating wage labor...nor a class all of whose participants expect and are prepared to have opinions, develop agendas, impact outcomes and who would be horrified to find themselves unable to manifest these characteristics. In other words, capitalism wants from education virtually the opposite of what education is ideally meant to do--that is for most (in some ways all) it wants to stunt aspirations and expectations and skills and knowledge rather than develop and enhance these.
--Noam Chomsky, linguist and educator (1928-)

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
--Noam Chomsky

Woe to you lawyers as well! For you weigh men down with burdens hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.
--Jesus Christ, Luke 11:46

I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
--Winston Churchill

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
--Winston Churchill

Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
--Winston Churchill

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
--Winston Churchill

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, and writer (1006-43 BCE)

Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecuna possit. [No place is so strongly fortified that money could not capture it.]
--Cicero

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
--Arthur Charles Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )<

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
--Clarke's Three Laws

The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away.
--John S. Coleman

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn :
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Mankind differs from the animals only by a little--and most people throw that away.
--Confucius

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
--Joseph Conrad

To accept no other order than that of affinities, no other chronology than that of the heart, no other schedule than that of unplanned encounters, the true ones.

No aceptar otro orden que el de las afinidades, otra cronología que la del corazón, otro horario que el de los encuentros a deshora, los verdaderos.
--Julio Cortázar, writer (1914-84)

You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.
--David Cronenberg

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
--Salvador Dalí, painter (1904-1989)

Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
--Frank Dane

Return unto thy science,
Which wills, that as the thing more perfect is,
The more it feels of pleasure and of pain.
--Dante, The Divine Comedy, Canto VI

Now canst thou, Son, behold the transient farce
Of goods that are committed unto Fortune,
For which the human race each other buffet;

For all the gold that is beneath the moon,
Or ever has been, of these weary souls
Could never make a single one repose.
--Dante, The Divine Comedy, Canto VII

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
--Richard Dawkins, The Root of All Evil

The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world can be remedied in the "next". The "everlasting arms" hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies--which, like a doctor's placebo, is nonetheless effective for being imaginary.
--Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is a considerable competition among memes for entry into as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere--and just as in the biosphere, this challenge has been met with great ingenuity.... For instance, memes can possess phenotypic expression that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or pre-empting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: for example the meme for faith--which discourages the sort of exercise of critical judgment that might decide the idea of faith was--all things considered--a dangerous idea.
--Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
--William Dement

The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stories: the tale of how, once upon a time, there was a Big Bang; the Darwinian epic of the evolution of life on Earth; and now the story we are just beginning to learn how to tell: the amazing adventure of the primate autobiographers who finally taught themselves how to tell the story of the amazing adventure of the primate autobiographers.
--Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind's I

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers.
--Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
--Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

"Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since--on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!"

We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a low ceiling, on the ground floor at the back. There was some company in the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, "You are to go and stand there, boy, till you are wanted." "There", being the window, I crossed to it, and stood "there," in a very uncomfortable state of mind, looking out.

The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.
--Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Oliver rose next morning, in better heart, and went about his usual occupations, with more hope and pleasure than he had known for many days. The birds were once more hung out, to sing, in their old places; and the sweetest wild flowers that could be found, were once more gathered to gladden Rose with their beauty. The melancholy which had seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic. The dew seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves; the air to rustle among them with a sweeter music; and the sky itself to look more blue and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.
--Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and, if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost matter of impossibility to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon indcidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced and materially influenced, by the MERE SILENT PRESENCE of some external object; which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.
--Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, require peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.
--Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

People thought about things at MIT and they took that thought seriously. People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except they chat about these things in bars after work. The things talked about in conversation at MIT, the people who were talking about them took themselves seriously. If they had good ideas on them they would recognise them and work on these things. That seems to me an immensely important attitude. That really is one of the things that separates good intellects from mediocre intellects, is the understanding that the intellect matters, that you matter. If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything, if you don't believe you can achieve something.
--Whitfield Diffie

A man can know nothing of mankind without knowing something of himself.
--Benjamin Disraeli, statesman, writer, and British Primee Minister (1804-81)

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
--Benjamin Disraeli

Nothing in life is more remarkable than the unnecessary anxiety which we endure, and generally create ourselves."
--Benjamin Disraeli

If... Senators cooperated on a textbook, the introduction would be 450 pages--and the text would be one page.
-- Sen. Byron Dorgan

Beauty will save the world.
--Feodor Dostoevsky

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
--William O. Douglas, judge (1898-1980)

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.
--Roger Ebert, film-critic (1942-)

There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Alva Edison, inventor (1847-1931)

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking.
--Thomas Edison

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
--Thomas Edison

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.
--Thomas Edison

Be yourself and do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
-Max Ehrmann, writer and lawyer (1872-1945)

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.
--Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel Prize winner (1879-19955)

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe.
--Albert Einstein

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
--Albert Einstein

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
--Albert Einstein

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
--Albert Einstein

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
--Albert Einstein

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
--Albert Einstein

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
--Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
--Albert Einstein

The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.
--Albert Einstein

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
--Albert Einstein

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
--Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
--Albert Einstein

Einstein's three rules of work:
1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president ((1890-1969)

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
--Dwight David Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th Presidennt, "Inaugural Address"

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
--T. S. Eliot

In my end is my beginning.
--T. S. Eliot

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, US philosopher, poet, essayist (18803-1882)

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
--Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)

I have never been contained except I made the prison.
--Mary Evans, actress (1888-1976)

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
--Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988))

For economists, the real world is often a special case. Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard).
--Edgar R. Fiedler

Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
--W.C. Fields (1880 - 1946)

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.
--Ricky Fitts in American Beauty

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with the final defeat.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
--Henry Ford

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
--Gene Fowler

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.
--Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (18444-1924)

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
--Anatole France

The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that it is everything.
--Anatole France

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.
--Anatole France

People who are willing to give up freedom for the sake of short term security, deserve neither freedom nor security.
--Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (17006-1790)

It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part.
--Benjamin Franklin

As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.
--Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939)

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast and seek to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
--Sigmund Freud

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
--Sigmund Freud

The artist opens out to others the way back to the comfort and consolation of their own unconscious sources of pleasure, and so reaps their gratitude and admiration; then he has won--through his phantasy--what before he could only win in phantasy: honour, power, and the love of women.
--Sigmund Freud

In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth--teaching others.
--Ibn Gabirol, poet and philosopher (c. 1022-1058)

God never occurs to you in person but always in action.
--Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
--Galileo Galilei

I'm proud to pay taxes in the United States; the only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.
--Arthur Godfrey, television host and entertainer (1903-11983)

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
--Stephen Jay Gould, biologist

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
--Stephen Jay Gould

By trying to make things easier for their children parents can make things much harder for them.
--Mardy Grothe, psychologist and author (1942- )

There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world.
--Marguerite Guardiner, writer (1789-1849)

Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end burn human beings.
--Heinrich Heine

Someone really needs to tell this to the MPAA and, especially, the RIAA:
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.
--Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line"
For a brilliant essay about why the RIAA is absolutely wrong, read this, written by a musician: www.baen.com/library/palaver11.htm

Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
--Robert Heinlein

"... Pixel got the tag 'Schroedinger's Cat' hung on him because he walks through walls."

"How does he do that?"

Jane Libby answered, "It's impossible but he's so young he doesn't know it's impossible, so he does it anyhow."
--Robert Heinlein, The Cat who Walks Through Walls>

What we see is not reality in itself, but reality exposed to our method of questioning.
--Werner Heisenberg

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
--Granville Hicks

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
--Alfred Hitchcock, director and screenwriter (1899-1980))

Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing.... Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.
--Russell Hoban, "Amaryllis Night and Day"

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
--Eric Hoffer, author (1902-1983)

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
--Eric Hoffer

In short, Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved.
--Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

The student Doko came to a Zen master, and said: "I am seeking the truth. In what state of mind should I train myself, so as to find it?"

Said the master, "There is no mind, so you cannot put it in any state. There is no truth, so you cannot train yourself for it."

"If there is no mind to train, and no truth to find, why do you have these monks gather before you every day to study Zen and train themselves for this study?"

"But I havent an inch of room here," said the master, "so how could the monks gather? I have no tongue, so how could I call them together or teach them?"

"Oh, how can you lie like this?" asked Doko.

"But if I have no tongue to talk to others, how can I lie to you?" asked the master.

Then Doko said sadly, "I cannot follow you. I cannot understand you."

"I cannot understand myself," said the master.

--from Gödel, Escher, Bach, 251

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
--Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings (1911)

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
--Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

To escape criticism--do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
--Elbert Hubbard

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous, those in philosophy only ridiculous.
--David Hume, Scottish philosopher, A Treatise of Humaan Nature

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions for reason.
--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Our reason must be considered as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect.
--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it.
--Fannie Hurst, writer (1889-1968)

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
--Robert Maynard Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
--Aldous Huxley, English novelist and essayist (1894-19633)

But I dont want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
--Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
--Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth--often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
--Hypatia of Alexandria

To think it, to want it--but do it too?
--Henrik Ibsen

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
--George Iles

Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
--Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.
--Robert G. Ingersoll

Bed is the poor man's opera.
--Italian proverb

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
--P. D. James

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
--Thomas Jefferson, architect, author, statesman and U.S.. President (1743-1826)

I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
--Thomas Jefferson

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
--Thomas Jefferson

Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
--Thomas Jefferson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
--Thomas Jefferson

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
--Thomas Jefferson

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.
--Thomas Jefferson

The nearest thing to immortality is this world is a government bureau.
-General Hugh S. Johnson

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim".
--Lyndon B. Johnson

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.
--Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
--Samuel Johnson

Words are but the signs of ideas.
--Samuel Johnson

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
--Samuel Johnson

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
--Samuel Johnson

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
--Samuel Johnson

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.
--Samuel Johnson, Preface to Dictionary of the Englishh Language (1755)

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
--Samuel Johnson

All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied.
--Samuel Johnson

Learn that the present hour alone is man's.
--Samuel Johnson

Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
--Samuel Johnson

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
--Samuel Johnson

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
--Samuel Johnson

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
--Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist (1875-1961)

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
--C. G. Jung

No one becomes depraved all at once.
--Juvenal

There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.
--Franz Kafka

I am an inquirer by inclination. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge, the unrest which goes with the desire to progress in it, and satisfaction at every advance in it. There was a time when I believed this constituted the honor of humanity, and I despised the people, who know nothing. Rousseau set me right about this. This binding prejudice disappeared. I learned to honor humanity, and I would find myself more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this attitude of mine can give worth to all others in establishing the rights of humanity.
--Immanuel Kant

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
--Mary Ellen Kelly

If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963)<

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
--John F. Kennedy

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds....

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must ever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force....

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
--Martin Luther King, Jr., from the famous speech

He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.
--Akira Kurosawa

Sad is his lot, who, once at least in his life, has not been a poet.
--Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine, poet, statessman (1790-1869)

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
--Anne Lamott

I always say my motto is, "Art for my sake."
--D. H. Lawrence

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
--Timothy Leary

China has expressed reservations about the United States using force in Iraq. The Chinese feel force should only be used in the rarest of circumstances--like when a college kid criticizes the government then you run him over in a tank.
--Jay Leno

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
--Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865)

Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.
--Abraham Lincoln, December 18, 1840

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
--Abraham Lincoln

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.
--John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704), Essay CConcerning Human Understanding

Government has no other end but the preservation of property.
--John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government<

...[G]enetic algorithms are computer programs designed to replicate themselves like biological life forms. "The programs are all set a problem to solve and the ones that do best are allowed to reproduce themselves for the next test. In other words, they pair off and have sex together"--so Ralph puts it, to the amusement of the students. "We split each program in two and swap the halves. If you do this often enough, sometimes you end up with more powerful programs than a human programmer could have designed."

"But they might get out of control," says Helen, "and take over the world."

More likely they'd end up in common rooms discussing whether human beings are conscious or not," he says.
--David Lodge, Thinks...

Consciousness is simply the medium in which one lives, and has a sense of personal identity. The problem is how to represent it, especially in different selves from one's own. In that sense novels could be called thought experiments.
--David Lodge, Thinks...

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet (1807-1882)

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
--James Russell Lowell, poet, essayist, and diplomat (18119-1891)

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
--James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)

The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
--James Madison

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.
--Thomas Mann

I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them.
--Steve Martin (1945-, comedian, actor)

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
--Groucho Marx

There is only one way to kill capitalism--by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
--Karl Marx

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
--W. Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
--Marshall McLuhan, cultural historian and communicationss theorist (1911-1980)

Where does the violet tint ends and the orange tint begin? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blending enter into the other. So with sanity and insanity.
--Herman Melville, author

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
--Henry Louis Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-11956)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins.
--H. L. Mencken

The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
--H. L. Mencken

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
--H. L. Mencken

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
--H. L. Mencken

Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel.
--H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
--H. L. Mencken

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all.
--Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, and poet (1475-1564)

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
-Michelangelo

Without reprieve, adjudged to death,
For want of well pronouncing shibboleth.
--John Milton, poet (1608-74)

Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant.... We have learned a lot in two thousand years, yet much ancient wisdom still seems sound, which makes me suspect that we haven't been making much progress.
--Marvin Minsky

They mind the business of their own right living.
They don't attack a sinner tooth and nail,
For sin's the only object of their hatred;
Nor are they over-zealous to attempt
Far more in heaven's behalf than heaven would have 'em.
--Moliere, Tartuffe

My life has been nothing but a failure.
--Claude Monet, painter (1840-1926)

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
--Michel de Montaigne, writer (1533-1592)

If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.
--Montesquieu

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
--John Morley, statesman and writer (1838-1923)

Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
--John Von Neumann

I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.
--Isaac Newton

I do not rule Russia; ten thousands clerks do.
--Nicholas I (1796-1855)

Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

God is a conjecture; but I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will. Could you create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods. But you could well create the overman.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not care to be herself.
--Anais Nin

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
--P.J. O'Rourke

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not a sum of what we have been but what we yearn to be.
--Jose Ortega y Gassett, essayist and philosopher (1883-11955)

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
--William Pitt, British prime-minister (1759-1806)

Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself.
--Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.
--Plato

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
--Plato

Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen."
--Pliny the Younger, lawyer, author, and philosopher (62--113CE)

The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.
--Plutarch

Sir, I admit your general rule
That every poet is a fool;
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.
--Alexander Pope, poet (1688-1744)

For all the intermittent frivolity and dastardly fickleness of Madame Fate, she occasionally provides such ambrosia that even the most consistently jaded soul sighs and dreams of things long since shrouded as impossibility.
--Alexander Pope

Were life any less sweet, I should still have to swallow it whole.
--Alexander Pope

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
--Marcel Proust, novelist (1871-1922)

The only paradise is paradise lost.
--Marcel Proust

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
--Marcel Proust

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
--Marcel Proust

The study of human nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were the first. To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except by studying it as a whole, and similarly one should study the man as a whole, including his relations to the universe as a whole. It is as wholes that great poets conceived of their poems and great artists of their pictures, and it is as a whole that each and every human life, standing as it does as the representative of the body of the universe, and the spirit of the universe, on the other, should implicitly be viewed.
--James J. Putnam

The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
--Ronald Reagan

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.
--Ronald Reagan

If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.
--Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)

A scholar knows no boredom.
--Jean Paul Richter, writer (1763-1825)

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.
--Rainer Rilke

If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.
--Tom Robbins, writer (1936- )

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
--Will Rogers

Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.
--Will Rogers

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do. That is character!
--Teddy Roosevelt

Holism is an overworked attribute, and doubtless has little in the way of evolutionary advantage to commend it. Mysticism is said to be holistic, but mysticism will never account for or explain neurological processes--while one day, neurological processes may well account for mysticism.
--Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain

[The above work was written in 1978. Recently, neurologists were able to image the brain during the experience of religious ecstasy. Take a look at this picture to see the difference between normal (on left) and ecstatic (right) states.]

The satiated man and the hungry one do not see the same thing when they look upon a loaf of bread.
--Rumi, poet and mystic (1207-1273)

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
--Bertrand Russell, Nobel laureate, philosopher, mathemattician, and author (1872-1970)

No one can deny, in the face of the evidence, that it is easy, given military power, to produce a population of fanatical lunatics. It would be equally easy to produce a population of sane and reasonable people, but many governments do not wish to do so, since such people would fail to admire the politicians who are at the head of these governments.
--Bertrand Russell

We are told that "evolution is the unfolding of an idea which has been in the mind of God." It appears that during these ages when animals were torturing each other with ferocious horns and agonizing stings, omnipotence was quietly waiting for the ultimate emergence of man, with his still more widely diffused cruelty. Why the Creator should have preferred to reach his goal by a process, instead of going straight to it, these modern theologians do not tell us.
--Bertrand Russell

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
--Bertrand Russell

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
--Bertrand Russell

When money speaks, the truth keeps silent.
--Russian proverb

La frase "toto tiempo pasado fue mejor" no indica que antes sucedieran menos cosas malas, sino que--felizmente--la gente las echa en olvido.
--Ernesto Sábato, El Túnel

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
--Carl Sagan, astronomer (1934-1996)

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
--Lord Salisbury, British prime minister (1830-1903)

There is knowledge of the consciousness. It sees through itself, peaceful and empty between the walls, freed from the man who inhabited it; monstrous because empty.
--Jean Paul Sartre

Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet. The entertainment industry's two-pronged offensive will have far-reaching effects -- its enlistment of the legal system erodes fair use and necessitates increased surveillance, and its attempt to turn computers into an Internet Entertainment Platform destroys the very thing that makes computers so useful -- but will fail in its intent. The Internet is not the death of copyright, any more than radio and television were. It's just different. We need business models that respect the natural laws of the digital world instead of fighting them.
--Bruce Schneier

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
--Lucius Annaeus Seneca, writer and philosopher (BCE 3-655 CE)

Why does no one confess his sins? Because he is yet in them. It is for a man who has awoke from sleep to tell his dreams.
--Seneca

But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
--William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616)

Few people think more than two or three times a year. I've made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
--George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950))

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
--George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
--George Bernard Shaw

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all stories.
--George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

A modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of writing it.
--George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

...[N]othing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose--a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions seem still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery and be overwhelmed by disappointments, yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.
--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
--Richard Brinsley Sheridan, playwright (1751-1816)

If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it.
--Jerome Singer

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
--B. F. Skinner

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
--Socrates, philosopher (469?-399 BCE)

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
--Socrates

Laws are the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.
--Solon, statesman (c. 638-c. 558 BCE)

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.
--Sophocles

The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
--John Steinbeck, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

Love knows of absences more vehement, more expressive of the promise of hope than is any presence.
--George Steiner

Finally, the rush to accord an "intelligent design" to nature is a direct result of ignorance--ignorance of Markov processes and how these can yield systems with order, starting from chaos.

A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.
--Adlai Stevenson, statesman (1900-1965)

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
--Robert Louis Stevenson, writer (1850-1894)

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
--Igor Stravinsky, composer (1882-1971)

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
--Igor Stravinsky

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.
--Bjarne Stroustrup, computer science professor, designerr of C++ programming language (1950-)

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
--Bjarne Stroustrup

We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another.
--Jonathan Swift, author (1667-1745)

The hardest person to awaken is the one already awake.
--Tagalog saying

Once you've seen the face of God,
You see that same face on everyone you meet.
--The Tao

Without too much trouble,
People can keep to the main road.
But people love to be distracted,
And perspective is difficult.
-The Tao

People hate as they love, unreasonably.
--William Makepeace Thackeray, novelist (1811-1863)

Security... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?

Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial arid personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-band. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better. What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?

Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
--Hunter S. Thompson, Security (1955) [This is acuutally not a quotation, but the full text of his piece.]

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
--Hunter S. Thompson

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
--Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)<

Men have become the tools of their tools.
--Henry David Thoreau

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
-Henry David Thoreau

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
--James Thurber, writer and cartoonist (1894-1961)

Linux does endless loops in six seconds.
--Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux operating system (19699-)

From the womb to the tomb, Madam Speaker, the Internal Rectal Service is one big enema. Think about it: They tax our income, they tax our savings, they tax our sex, they tax our property-sales profits, they even tax our income when we die. Is it any wonder America is taxed off? We happen to be suffering from a disease called Taxes Mortis Americanus. Beam me up!
--James Traficant, US congressman (1941-)

Mr. Speaker, gasoline is $2.20 a gallon. That's right, $2.20. Now, if that is not enough to bust your bunions, Congress gives billions of dollars to OPEC countries, and they rip us off. To boot, the domestic oil companies are gouging us so bad, we are all passing gas. Beam me up!
--James Traficant

If the White House succeeds in getting China admitted to the World Trade Organization, I say the White House needs a lobotomy performed by a proctologist.
--James Traficant

Just remember that there are some bizarre or rare symptoms that are not covered, or that a monitor may have two or more problems that only a genius, the experienced, or an experienced genius can figure out.
--from the manual for the Tron arcade game

It was a narrow escape. If the sheep had been created first, man would have been a plagiarism.
--Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), author and humorrist (1835-1910)

We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.
--Mark Twain

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
--Mark Twain

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
--Mark Twain

I have a higher and greater standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie but I won't.
--Mark Twain

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.
--Mark Twain

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
--Mark Twain

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
--Mark Twain

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
--Mark Twain

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
--Mark Twain

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
--Mark Twain

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
--Mark Twain

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting start is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
--Mark Twain

Keep away from the people that belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
--Mark Twain

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
--Mark Twain

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
--Mark Twain

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
--Mark Twain

The man with a new idea is a crank. Until the idea succeeds.
--Mark Twain

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
--Mark Twain

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.
--Mark Twain

Each race determines for itself what indecencies are. Nature knows no indecencies, man invents them.
--Mark Twain

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and the government when it deserves it.
--Mark Twain

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied often to prayer.
--Mark Twain

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
--Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
--Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
--Mark Twain, Pudd'n'head Wilson

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently aware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
--Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
--attributed to Mark Twain

A classic is something that everybody praises and nobody has read.
--attributed to Mark Twain

To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.
--Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
--Gore Vidal, author (1925-)

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
--Gore Vidal

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.
--Leonardo da Vinci, artist, inventor, scientist (1452-15519)

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
--Leonardo da Vinci

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. --Leonardo da Vinci

It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.
--Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
--Voltaire

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
--Voltaire

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
--Voltaire

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.
--Earl Warren, jurist (1891-1974)

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation, for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company.
--George Washington, statesman and first US president (17732-1799)

If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
--George Washington

The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those who feel.
--Horace Walpole, author and 4th Earl of Oxford (1717-17997)

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
--H. G. Wells

But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
--West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
--John A. Wheeler, physicist [Richard Feynman was his mosst famous pupil]

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
--E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
--Walt Whitman

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.
--Robert S. Wieder, journalist

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
--Oscar Wilde, author and playwright (1854-1900)

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
--William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it.
--Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the U.S., Nobel peacee prize winner (1856-1924)

The great government we loved has too often been made use of for selfish purposes.
--Woodrow Wilson

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

High is our calling, Friend! Creative Art
(Whether the instrument of words she use,
Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,)
Demands the service of a mind and heart.
--William Wordsworth, poet (1770-1850)

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
--Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (1868-1959)

Reverence is The source of divine favors;
Without it,
Buddhas and wooden clogs are only pieces of wood.
--Zen saying

We make life real
By the thoughts we project.<
--Zen Saying