Kyle's Collected Quotations of Special Interest


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"If anyone speaks evil of you, so live that none will believe it." --unknown

"Hate has a reason for everything, but love is unreasonable." --"V. Raiuhes Ahaefvthe," who is apparently a fictional character from some person unknown to me

"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this is a coincidence." --Jeremy S. Anderson

"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults." --Peter DeVries

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." --Robert A. Heinlein

"Chaos. Chaos is good." --Lauren Johnson

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

"All fiction is autobiographical fantasy." --James Joyce

"To love another person is to see the face of God." --Les Miserables, the musical

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than speak out and remove all doubt." --Abraham Lincoln

"There are two equally dangerous extremes -- to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in." --Pascal

"Remember: no one can make you feel inferior without your consent." --Eleanor Roosevelt

"Not all those that wander are lost." --J.R.R. Tolkien

"I get the room next to the noisy ice machine for all eternity." --Weird Al Yankovic

"If you don't mind me asking, what's this poisonous cobra doin' in my underwear drawer?" --Weird Al Yankovic

"The world is slowly learning that because two men think differently, neither need be wicked." --unknown

"She questioned her own competence, but didn't care to have others participating in the exercise." --Jack McDevitt, The Engines of God

"The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love." --William Wordsworth

"Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it." --Heard on the INFJ List

"All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest." --Simon and Garfunkel, "The Boxer"

"[Lester] Grispoon cautioned Sagan to be careful, for, 'romantic love was one of the two socially acceptable psychoses.' (The other was adolescence.)" --in Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life

"The good Earth -- we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy." --Kurt Vonnegut

"There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives." --unknown

"The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears." --John Vance Cheney

"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." --Marshall McLuhan

"How can you govern a nation which has 246 kinds of cheese?" --Charles de Gaulle

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing." --Benjamin Franklin

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies.  The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of hell." --St. Augustine

"Every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these." --George Washington Carver

"Well, that was a piece of cake, eh K-9?"

"Piece of cake, Master? Radial slice of baked confection ... coefficient of relevance to Key of Time: zero." --Dr. Who

"I'd rather be a hammer than a nail." --Simon and Garfunkel, "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)"

"In this world, there are victims and victimizers.  I'm going to be a victimizer."  --Hersh Reddy

Thrakorzog: "Surrender Tick, you're hopelessy outclassed."

Tick: "I don't know the meaning of the word surrender...uh, I mean, I know it, I'm not dumb, just not in this context."

--The Tick

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." --Josh Billings

"Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen." --Leonardo Da Vinci

"The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality." --Ariel Durant

"It could only be a record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers." --Albert Camus, The Plague

"Then again, those were happy who had not suffered a two-fold separation, like some of us who, in the days before the epidemic, had failed to build their love on a solid basis at the outset, and had spent years blindly groping for the pact, so slow and hard to come by, that in the long run binds together ill-assorted lovers. Such people had had, like Rieux himself, the rashness of counting overmuch on time; and now they were parted forever." --Albert Camus, The Plague

"The man who thinks he can do without the world is indeed mistaken; but the man who thinks the world cannot do without him is mistaken even worse." --Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Did you ever walk in a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives." --Sue Murphy

"I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management." --E.B. White

"Some people cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." --unknown

"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." --unknown

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines." --unknown

"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes." --unknown

"Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die." --Amelia Burr

"The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, the night-watch goes by, and I sleep alone." --Sappho

"As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own." --Margaret Mead

"The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts." --George Matthew Adams

""What would they do to me," he asked in confidential tones, "if I refused to fly them?"

"We'd probably shoot you," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.

"We?" Yossarian cried in surprise. "What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?"

"If you're going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?" ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted." --Joseph Heller, Catch-22

"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three." --Joseph Heller, Catch-22

"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep." --Albert Einstein

"A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope." --Epictetus

"Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things." --Amelia Earhart

"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had." -- Linus Torvalds

"It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases." --Johan Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off the fence." I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true." -- Solomon Short

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." --Voltaire

"Free Speech Is The Right To Shout 'Theater' In A Crowded Fire." -- A Yippie Proverb

"Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up." --Jesse Louis Jackson

"When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations... At the same time, you feel sure that in all the wilderness of possibility; in all the forests of opinion, there is a vital something that can be known -- known and grasped. That we will eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. So that then one's true life -- the point of everything -- will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension. But it isn't like that at all. But if it isn't, where did the idea come from, to torture and unsettle us?" --Brian Aldiss, Helliconia Summer

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back." --Chinese Proverb

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." --Niels Bohr

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." --Rene Descartes

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." --Edsger W. Dijkstra

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

"He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever." --Chinese proverb

"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." --Lily Tomlin

"Observe your enemies, for they first find out your faults." --Antisthenes

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." --Robert Silensky

"Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability." --Cicero

"From the people at Lovecraft Foods: 'Cthluloops. Sometimes you eat the cereal. Sometimes the cereal eats you!'" --unknown

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." --Elbert Hubbard

"Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake." --Viktor Frankl

"I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs." --Larry Lee

"The big thieves hang the little ones." --Czech proverb

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

"The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason He makes so many of them." --Abraham Lincoln

"And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." --J.R.R. Tolkien

"Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind." --Leonardo da Vinci

"The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing." --Nancy Astor

"Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion." --Mark Twain

"All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward." --Ellen Glasgow

"For the man who has everything... Penicillin." --F. Borquin

"Words are things; and a small drop of ink / Falling like dew upon a thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think." --Lord Byron

"All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy." --Paracelsus

"It looked like something resembling white marble, which was probably what it was: something resembling white marble." --Douglas Adams

"Why 42? The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do.' I typed it out. End of story." --Douglas Adams

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." --Arthur C. Clarke

"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career." --Gloria Steinem

"Words, like eyeglasses, obscure everything they do not make clear." --Joseph Joubert

"You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young!"

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen!"

-- Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

"There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering." --unknown

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." --Isaac Newton

"Support Bacteria! It's the only culture some people have." --bumper sticker

"Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch." --Robert Orben

"The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true." --James Branch Cabell

"Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a car." --unknown

"A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living." --Henry David Thoreau

"Who, being loved, is poor?" --Oscar Wilde

"When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages." --Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right." --H.L. Mencken

"Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians." --John Stuart Mill

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it." --Rabindranath Tagore

"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come." --Rabindranath Tagore

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers." --Charles W. Eliot

"Interfere? Of course we should interfere! Always do what you're best at, that's what I say." --Dr. Who

"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." --Doug Gwyn

"The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality." --John Quincy Adams

"A good name lost is seldom regained. When character is gone, all is gone, and one of the richest jewels of life is lost forever." --J. Hawes

"He who would travel happily must travel light." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere: the dew is never all dried at once: a shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." --John Muir

"Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can save a couple of hours in the library." --Frank H. Westheimer

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." --Henry David Thoreau

"I still miss my x-wife. But my aim is improving." --bumper sticker

"In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter." --Chinese proverb

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." --Thomas Hewitt Key

"The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else." --John Updike

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err." --Mohandas K. Gandhi

"The Internet was invented by the American military back in the late 60's. It was designed to be a durable, scalable, de-centralized, information delivery system, so that in the event of a nuclear attack American military leaders would still have access to pornography." --Paul Mather, Internet

"Keep in mind always the four constant Laws of Frisbee:

(1) The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this force is technically termed "car suck").

(2) Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than "Watch this!"

(3) The probability of a Frisbee hitting something is directly proportional to the cost of hitting it. For instance, a Frisbee will always head directly towards a policeman or a little old lady rather than the beat up Chevy.

(4) Your best throw happens when no one is watching; when the cute girl you've been trying to impress is watching, the Frisbee will invariably bounce out of your hand or hit you in the head and knock you silly." --unknown

"The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese." --bumper sticker

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." --Elie Wiesel

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it." --John Keats

"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power." --Lao-Tzu

"The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort of voluntary thinking."--William James

"Trust in Allah, but tie your camel." --Arabic saying

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

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well." --Voltaire

"I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." --Lily Tomlin

"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold." --Aristotle

"To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top." --Robert M. Pirsig

"Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I'm halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God ... I could be eating a slow learner." --Lynda Montgomery

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die." --H.L. Mencken

"One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything." --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right." --Salvor Hardin in Asimov's Foundation

"Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do." --R. A. Heinlein

"A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady." --Voltaire

"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born." --Francois Fenelon

"Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us." --Henrik Tikkanen

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." --Clive Staples Lewis

"If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." --Robert Frost

"A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one." --J. Pierpoint Morgan

"No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same." --Viktor Frankl

"That sorrow which is the harbinger of joy is preferable to the joy which is followed by sorrow." --Saadi

"The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"If everything is coming your way, then you're in the wrong lane." --bumper sticker

"No man is worth your tears and the one that is will never make you cry." --Kim Kehler

"Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer." --Charles Caleb Colton

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

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." --Anais Nin

"It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." --John Andrew Holmes

"A man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools." --Spanish proverb

"For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The credit belongs to those people who are actually in the arena... who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions to a worthy cause; who, at best, know the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." --Teddy Roosevelt

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain." --Sara Teasdale

"Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves." --Abraham Lincoln

"If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time." --Chinese Proverb

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come." --Victor Hugo

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order." --Alfred North Whitehead

"Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." --Marcus Tullius Cicero

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." --Charles Babbage

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed." --Natalie Clifford Barney

"Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness." --Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends." --Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"More die in the United States of too much food than of too little." --John Kenneth Galbraith

"If I was marooned on a small desert island with sand and one small measly palm tree, and all I had to drink was foul-tasting ocean water or Diet Dr. Pepper, I would get seriously annoyed at whoever thought up such an absurd situation." --Will Guaraldi

"A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations." --Bertrand Russel

"Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work." --Anatole France

"Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't." --Pete Seeger

"Those who wish to sing always find a song." --Swedish proverb

"There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect." --Henry David Thoreau

"May those that love us love us; and those that don't love us, may God turn their hearts; and if he doesn't turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles so we'll know them by their limping." --Irish toast

"The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse." --Jules Renard

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." --Dante Alighieri

"Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man." --Benjamin Franklin

"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish." --Anne Bradstreet

"Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Now you be sure and dress warmly on those other planes of existence." --Beverly Crusher to her son Wesley, Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station." --Joseph Addison

"To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." --Karen Sunde

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." --Mignon McLaughlin

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." --Will Durant

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." --Abraham Lincoln

"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." --Dave Barry

"There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." --Morpheus, The Matrix

"In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth -- teaching others." --Ibn Gabirol

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." --J. R. R. Tolkien

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." --Douglas Adams

"If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." --Dr. Who

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse." --Thomas Szasz

"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions." --Frank Lloyd Wright

"Kings stand more in need of the company of the intelligent than the intelligent do of the society of kings." --Saadi

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania

"There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed." --Buddha

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit." --Helen Keller

"A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs--jolted by every pebble in the road." --Henry Ward Beecher

"The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." --Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan

"Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world." --Lily Tomlin

"I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble." --Caesar Augustus

"An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather." --Washington Irving

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used." --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment." --Learned Hand

"Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be: partisans but never zealots, respected of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely able to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered... or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power. Quite the opposite. And when things go wrong ... [...] ... The men the civics books idolize rarely come to good ends." --Stephen King, The Stand

"If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe." --Carl Sagan

"I'd rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are;

because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star.

I'd rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far;

for a might-have-been has never been, but a has was once an are." --Milton Berle

"You have to dance like no one is watching and love like it's never going to hurt." --unknown

"Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep burning, unquenchable." --Henry Ward Beecher

"Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice." --Nora Roberts

"Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so." --David Grayson

"Perfect love is rare indeed - for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain." --Leo Buscaglia

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire-- it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great." --Comte deBussy-Rabutin Histoire Amoureuse des Gaulles

"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fires." --La Rochefoucauld

"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?" --Stephen Levine

"There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer, no disease that enough love will not heal, no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no wall that enough love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem. It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world." --Emmet Fox

"For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul." --Judy Garland

"Life is like a ten speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use." --Charles Schultz

"Words form the thread on which we string our experience." --Aldous Huxley

"In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it." --John Ruskin

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life." --Frank Zappa

"Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him." --Booker T. Washington

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together." --Eugene Ionesco

"'Always' and 'Never' are not dirty words. Any sense of integrity relies on them as essential components."

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." --Salvador Dali

"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." --African proverb

"And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." --Aeschylus

"To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind." --Theophile Gautier

"'It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.'

'Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,' said Legolas. 'And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.'

'And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens,' said the Dwarf.

'To that the Elves know not the answer,' said Legolas." --J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

"Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad." --Anon.

"He's the best of us. The best of our best, the best that each of us will ever build or ever love. So pray for this Guardian of our growth and choose him well, for if he be not truly blest, then our designs are surely frivolous and our future but a tragic waste of hope. Bless our best and adore for he doth bear our measure to the Cosmos." -John Steakley, Armor, p. 62

"After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one." --Cato the Elder

"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic "progress" leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil." --J.R.R. Tolkien

"It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness." --Motto of the Christopher Society, perhaps originating as a Chinese proverb

"If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing." --Anon.

"Traveling is a fool's paradise... I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there besides me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!" --Abraham Lincoln

"War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses." --Thomas Jefferson

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." --William Butler Yeats

"The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life." --Leo Tolstoy

"The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip. You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink." - Stephen King, On Writing

"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece." --John Ruskin

"I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them." --Isaac Asimov

"Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove." --Ashleigh Brilliant

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win." --Jonathan Kozol

"In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds." --Robert Green Ingersoll

"After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box." --Italian proverb

"All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men." --Hilaire Belloc

"Weinberg, as a young grocery clerk, advised the grocery manager to get rid of rutabagas, which nobody ever bought. He did so. 'Well, kid, that was a great idea,' said the manager. Then he paused and asked the killer question, 'NOW what's the least popular vegetable?'

Law: Once you eliminate your #1 problem, #2 gets a promotion." --Gerald Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting

"The wastebasket is a writer's best friend." --Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships." --Charles Simic

"No doubt there are other important things in life besides conflict, but there are not many other things so inevitably interesting. The very saints interest us most when we think of them as enganged in a conflict with the Devil." --Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion

"When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him." --Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student

"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." --Albert Einstein

"A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space." --Gloria Steinem

"The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own." --Michael Konda

"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes." --Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort." --Sydney Smith

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." --William Shakespeare

"To resist the frigidity of old age one must combine the body, the mind and the heart - and to keep them in parallel vigor one must exercise, study and love." --Karl Viktor von Bonstetten

"Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not." --Lao Tzu

"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work." --Carl Sandburg

"Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe." --Robert Service

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." --H. G. Wells

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." --Helen Keller

"We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?" --Edward Young

"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character." --W. Somerset Maugham

"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

"'When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,' said Piglet at last, 'what's the first thing you say to yourself?'

'What's for breakfast?' said Pooh. 'What do you say, Piglet?'

'I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?' said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. 'It's the same thing,' he said." --Winnie the Pooh

"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

"I resolved never to accept or oppose undesirable socioeconomic phenomena, but instead committed myself to evolving and cultivating tools that would accomplish humanity's necessitous tasks in so much easier, more pleasant and more efficient ways that, without thinking about it, the undesirable ways would be abandoned by society." --R. Buckminster Fuller

"Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading." --Horace

"Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change." --Confucius

"Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken." --Frank Herbert, Dune

"When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?" --Edith Evans

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." --Matt Cartmill

"Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me." --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise." --Voltaire

"It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'" --Aldous Huxley

"To measure the man, measure his heart." --Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

"A process cannot be undestood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it." --The First law of the Mentat, Frank Herbert, Dune

"I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.' --Thomas Jefferson

"I long for wildness... woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved... a New Hampshire everlasting and unfallen." --Henry David Thoreau

"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit!" --The Tick

"Nothing so soon the drooping spirits can raise / As praises from the men, whom all men praise." --Abraham Cowley

"He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink." --John Ray

"Ah, hello! It's nice to see you all here. As the more perceptive of you probably realised by now, this is Hell. And I am the Devil (good evening), but you can call me Toby, if you like. We try to keep things informal in here, as well as infernal. That's just a little joke of mine. I tell it every time." --Rowan Atkinson as The Devil

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. " --Carl Sandburg

"Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them." --Aristotle

"Luck never gives; it only lends." --Swedish proverb

"To change and to change for the better are two different things." --German proverb

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self." --Aristotle

"Never confuse motion with action." --Benjamin Franklin

"What a man says drunk he has thought sober." --Flemish proverb

"To understand your parents' love, bear your own children." --Chinese saying

"When confronted with impossible situations, some people do the unimaginable with the conviction that it will work. I call them religious." --Ben Guaraldi

"None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives." --Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

"The context may die, but the quote lives ever on!" --Will Guaraldi

"Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness." --Kahlil Gibran

"In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain." --Friedrich Nietzsche

"I am certain that none of the world's problems have any hope of solution except through all of the world's individuals becoming thoroughly and comprehensively self-educated. Only then will society be able to identify, and inter-communicate, the vital problems of total world society. Only then may humanity effectively sort out and put those problems into an order of importance for solutions that will work for all life on Earth." --R. Buckminster Fuller

"Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit." --Elbert Hubbard

"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

"A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book." --Irish proverb

"Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves." --James Matthew Barrie

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed." --Sean O'Casey

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." --Laurence J. Peter

"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit." --Albert Schweitzer

"Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children." --Kahlil Gibran

"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." --Drew Carey

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." --Charles Peguy

"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles." --George Jean Nathan

"Suppose you were an idiot... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeat myself." --Mark Twain

"Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to LIVE everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." --Rainer Maria Rilke

"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day." --Robert Frost

"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?" --Jean Jacques Rousseau

"Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait." --A. Whitney Brown

"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs." --Carl Sagan

"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators." --Albert Camus

"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." --Bertrand Russell

"When I was younger, I made two stones--one for me and one for my soulmate. But then I realized that I was my own soulmate. Every day, I hold both stones for a while to remind myself of that." --Carla Nomaiia

"Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed." --Christopher Morley

"God gave man two ears and one tongue so that we listen twice as much as we speak." --Arab proverb

"Poetry is kind of supreme speech, an attempt at recovering a language momentarily adequate to truth; it is the language of paradise in which lovemaking and prayer do not contradict each other." --Patricia Storace

"I can't possibly overstate the importance of good research. Everyone goes through life dropping crumbs. If you can recognize the crumbs, you can trace a path all the way back from your death certificate to the dinner and a movie that resulted in you in the first place. But research is an art, not a science, because anyone who knows what they're doing can find the crumbs, the wheres, whats, and whos. The art is in the whys: the ability to read between the crumbs, not to mix metaphors. For every event, there is a cause and effect. For every crime, a motive. And for every motive, a passion. The art of research is the ability to look at the details, and see the passion." --Daryl Zero, Zero Effect

"Those of you who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do." --unknown

"Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts inevitably bring about right results." --James Allen

"Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them." --Daryl Zero, Zero Effect

"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers." --Kahlil Gibran

"Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

("But who shall watch the watchers themselves?")

--Juvenal, Satires

"To me, being a geek means mostly that you don't think you're this amazing, suave, cool person. It means that you have unusual interests, a strong sense of humility, and you don't take yourself seriously. I have a large group of geek friends, and we usually organize three or four social activities a week, so being anti-social or socially inept is not part of my definition of geek. The best part about being a geek is that you don't have to spend a lot of time keeping up appearances. Yes, I am interested in computers, and I don't know what happened on the latest episode of "Friends," and my fashion sense is terrible -- and that's okay." --Val Henson

"No good woman is going to ridicule you for being a little nervous. If anything, a little nervousness is a compliment to her beauty; and God save us from smooth men." --Cary Tennis, Salon.com Since You Asked...

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

"And your heart ain't yours to control no matter how tight the reigns; love will find it's own direction, a time to reap, a time to sow, and many a time to cry in vain; but now the time to celebrate the glory of this imperfection, same thing that's scrawled across the stars, is written under our skin, new horizon, new horizon within." --David Gray

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...You must do the thing you think you cannot do." --Eleanor Roosevelt, "You Learn by Living"

"Why pay money to have your family tree traced? Go into politics and your opponents will do it for you." --Mark Twain

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts." --Voltaire

"Only in silence the word,

only in dark the light,

only in dying life:

bright the hawk's flight

on the empty sky." --The Creation of Ea from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

"Of all nature's gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?" --Marcus Tullius Cicero

"This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." --T.S. Eliot

"There are many who find the burden, the anxiety, and the isolation of an individual existence unbearable. This is particularly true when the opportunities for self-advancement are relatively meager, and one's individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for. Such persons sooner or later turn their backs on an individual existence and strive to acquire a sense of worth and a purpose by an identification with a holy cause, a leader, or a movement. The faith and pride they derive from such an identification serve them as substitutes for the unattainable self-confidence and self-respect." --Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

"Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months." --Clifford Stoll

"The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight, / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." --Rich Kulawiec

"I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." --Robert Frost

"I think -- therefore I'm single." --Lizz Winstead

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." --Robert Frost

"Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well." --Josh Billings

"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness." --Thomas Carlyle

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write." --William Makepeace Thackeray

"There is a word sweeter than mother, home, or heaven -- That word is liberty." --Epitaph on the grave of Matilda Joslyn Gage, suffragist, abolitionist

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once."

--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

"Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something of the wisdom of shaving." --unknown

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep." --Robert Frost

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information. When information grows unprofitable, sleep." --Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

"The fearless are merely fearless. People who act in spite of their fear are truly brave." --James A. LaFond-Lewis

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." --Alexander Hamilton

"Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone." --Thomas De Quincey

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." --Jacob Chanowski

"Everything that can be invented, has been invented." --Charless Duell, Controller of the US Patent Office, 1899

"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments." --Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus, AD 10

"Anyone looking for a source of power in the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine." --Sir Ernest Rutherford, 1933

"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad." --President of Michigan gives advice to Horace Rackham, Henry Ford's lawyer

"X-rays will prove to be a hoax." --Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1894

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes." --Popular Mechanics, 1949

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs in ridiculous fiction." --Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

"Television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." --Daryl F. Zanuck, President, 20th Century Fox, 1946

"Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances." --Dr. Lee de Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube, 1957

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." --Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859

"Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve, any results of the slightest value." --Benjamin Jowett, British theologian, 1817-1893

"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." --Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, 1876

"The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists." --Japanese proverb

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt

"Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them." --Anne of the Island

"Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry." --Spanish Proverb

"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

"Specialization is only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially, culturally preferred, ergo highly-secure, lifelong position." --R. Buckminster Fuller

"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

"The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions--the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." --Confucius

"We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing-jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home. ... [Thus,] the first step is to pay people the handsome fellowships to stay at home and say to themselves, 'What was I thinking about before I was first told, convincingly, that I had to 'earn a living' by doing what someone else said I had to do?' Then let them discover that their fellowship income will permit them to travel objectively to search and research and engage in creative or productive endeavors anywhere around the world." --R. Buckminster Fuller

"I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful." --John Ruskin

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

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." --Blaise Pascal

"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters." --Paul Gauguin

"A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience." --Doug Larson

"I never did one thing right in my life, you know that? Not one. That takes skill." --Mitch Henessey, The Long Kiss Goodnight

"A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular." --Adlai Stevenson

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." --Friedrich Nietzsche

"What you are thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things." --Plato

"The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all." --Maurice Maeterlinck

"The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out." --Thomas Babington Macaulay

"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it." --Jeseph Joubert

"We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them." --Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own." --Aesop

"For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography." --Robert Penn Warren

"He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak." --Michel de Montaigne

"Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A man never tells you anything until you contradict him." --George Bernard Shaw

"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him." --John Morley

"There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees." --Michel de Montaigne

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place." --William Strunk and E.B. White, authors of The Elements of Style

"There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight." --Vaclav Havel

"We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it." --Jules Renard

"I had lots of reasonable theories about children myself, until I had some." --Michael Rios

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." --Greek proverb

"Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent." --Horace Walpole

"Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." --John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study." --Francis Bacon

"The music than can deepest reach, / And cure all ill, is cordial speech." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

"If you can imagine it,

You can achieve it.

If you can dream it,

You can become it."

--William Arthur Ward

"Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due." --William R. Inge

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly." --Langston Hughes

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." --Anatole France

"Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps." --David Lloyd George

"A person who aims at nothing is sure to hit it." --Anon.

"Spring is a natural resurrection, an experience in immortality." --Henry David Thoreau

"When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light." --John W. Gardner

"Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak." --William Congreve

"We are told never to cross a bridge until we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have 'crossed bridges' in their imagination far ahead of the crowd." --Anon.

"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

"The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating." --Heard in a neuropsychology classroom, as heard on A.Word.A.Day

"As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." --New York Times Editorial, 1920

"Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought." --Francois Gautier

"To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style." --Aldous Huxley

"Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The best way out is always through." --Robert Frost

"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." --Edwin Schlossberg

"Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart." --Washington Irving

"It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars." --Garrison Keillor

"I'm not the person your mother warned you about... her imagination isn't that good." --Amy Gorin

"A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." --Barnett Cocks

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

"Never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart." --Charles Dickens

"There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving." --Aldous Huxley

"Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world." --Anonymous

"Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours For one lone soul another lonely soul, Each choosing each through all the weary hours, And meeting strangely at one sudden goal, Then blend they, like green leaves with golden flowers. Into one beautiful perfect whole; And life's long night is ended, and the way Lies open onward to eternal day." --Edwin Arnold

"To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person." --Eric Fromm

"I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like a genuis, she is ignorant of what she does." --Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

"People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense." --Ken Kesey

"Whenever someone asks me to define love, I usually think for a minute, then I spin around and pin the guy's arm behind his back. NOW who's asking the questions?" --Jack Handey

"Without a struggle, there can be no progress." --Frederick Douglass

"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant." --Horace

"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." --Thomas Paine

"It often happens that those of whom we speak least on earth are best known in heaven." --Nicolas Caussin

"Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold--but so does a hard-boiled egg." --Anon.

"The case for my life, then," G. H. Hardy wrote in his Apology "or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them."

"It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself." --Eleanor Roosevelt

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." --Henry David Thoreau

"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Seize the day; put no trust in tomorrow." --Horace, Odes

"God could not be everywhere, and therefore he created mothers." --Jewish proverb

"To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing." --Elbert Hubbard

"Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." --Margaret Mead

"People only see what they are prepared to see." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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

"Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." --Wernher von Braun

"Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size." --Mark Twain

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering." --Arthur C. Clarke

"In the beginning, I was made. I didn't ask to be made. No one consulted with me or considered my feelings in this matter. But if it brought some passing fancy to some lowly humans as they haphazardly pranced their way through life's mournful jungle, then so be it." --Marvin the Paranoid Android, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show

"There is such a fine line between genius and stupidity." --David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap

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

"A guidance counselor who has made a fetish of security, or who has unwittingly surrendered his thinking to economic determinism, may steer a youth away from his dream of becoming a poet, an artist, a musician or any other of thousands of things, because it offers no security, it does not pay well, there are no vacancies, it has no 'future.'" --Henry M. Wriston, 11th president of Brown University

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." --Arthur C. Clarke

"Deteriorata!

The following poem was not found in an old Baltimore church:

[Introduction]

You are a fluke
Of the universe.
You have no right to be here.....
Deteriorata! Deteriorata!
Go placidly
Amid the noise and waste.
And remember what comfort there may be
In owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons
Unless you are in need of sleep.
Ro-tate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself
And heed well their advice,
Even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss.....and when!
Consider that two wrongs never make a right
But that THREE.........do.
Wherever possible, put people on hold.
Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment
And despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer main-te-nance.

[Chorus]
You are a fluke
Of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not
The universe is laughing behind your back.
Remember the Pueblo.
Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle and mu-ti-late.
Know yourself.
If you need help, call the FBI.
Exercise caution in your daily affairs,
Especially with those persons closest to you.
That lemon on your left, for instance.
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls
Would scarcely get your feet wet.
Fall not in love therefore;
It will stick to your face.
Gracefully surrender the things of youth:
The birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan
And let not the sands of time
Get in your lunch.
Hire people with hooks.
For a good time call 606-4311;
Ask for "Ken."
Take heart amid the deepening gloom
That your dog is finally getting enough cheese.
And reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot
It could only be worse in Milwaukee.

[Chorus]
You are a fluke
Of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not
The universe is laughing behind your back.
Therefore, make peace with your god
Whatever you conceive him to be---
Hairy thunderer, or cosmic muffin.
With all its hopes, dreams, promises and urban renewal
The world continues to deteriorate.
GIVE UP!"
--National Lampoon

"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

"I find your lack of faith disturbing." --Darth Vader, Star Wars

"Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?" --Thomas J. Watson

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'" --Isaac Asimov

"As for kissing on the first date, you should never date someone whom you would not wish to kiss immediately." --Garrison Keillor, as heard on Salon.com

"To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious." --Samuel Butler

"Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets." --Eddy Peters

"Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds." --J. Finnegan, USC

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." --Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor

"It's a cardboard universe... and if you lean too hard against it, you fall through." --Philip K. Dick

"Some mornings it just isn't worth chewing through the leather straps." --Emo Phillips

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." --Isaac Newton

"The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth." --Harry Emerson Fosdick

"See how the masses of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality." --Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Roman Empire once stretched from North Africa to Gaul, from the British Isles to Israel. And yet, if the Romans had instead concentrated on taking an easy continent like Australia, then cashed in their cards at the right time, the Roman Empire might still be around today." --Paul Mather, "What You Need To Know About The Romans"

"Please subdue the anguish of your soul. Nobody is destined only to happiness or to pain. The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn." --Kalidasa

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common--this is my symphony." --William Henry Channing

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me." --Fred Allen

"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish." --Euripides

"What is art but a way of seeing?" --Thomas Berger

"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." --Mahatma Gandhi

"His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it." --Lois McMaster Bujold

"Never tell evil of a man if you do not know it for a certainty, and if you know it for a certainty, then ask yourself, 'Why should I tell it?'" --Jonathan K. Lavater

"The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do." --B.F. Skinner

"Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young." --Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created." --Albert Einstein

"Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me." --Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"A man's health can be judged by which he takes two at a time--pills or stairs." --Joan Welsh

"I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice." --Joyce Carol Oates

"To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead." --Samuel Butler

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." --R. Buckminster Fuller

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?" --Kahlil Gibran

"Let me assure you that to us here at First National, you're not just a number. You're two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash and another number." --James Estes

"It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say." --Thomas Merton

"Words are the soul's ambassadors, who go / Abroad upon her errands to and fro." --James Howell

"Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Let me do and I understand." --Confucius

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." --Crowfoot

"No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." --John Donne

"A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company." --Charles Evans Hughes

"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." --Joseph Campbell

"The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity." --unknown

"Nobody believes the official spokesman ... but everybody trusts an unidentified source." --Ron Nessen

"What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse." --Edward Abbey

"One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it." --Vincent van Gogh

"Danger and delight grow on one stalk." --English Proverb

"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds." --Edward Abbey

"The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future." --Oscar Wilde

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." --John Muir

"Last week a cop stopped me in my car. He asked me if I had a police record. I said, no, but I have the new DEVO album. Cops have no sense of humor." --unknown

"The superfluous is very necessary." --Voltaire

"To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to." --Kahlil Gibran

"The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit." --Moliere

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." --Oscar Wilde

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

"Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time." --Neal Stephenson

"It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted." --Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Swords and guns have no eyes." --Chinese proverb

"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"After all these years I have finally realized that Fonzie was never, in fact, cool. The man always wore the same leather jacket. He lived in a garage and his "office" was a bathroom. He was thirty years old and he was dating high school girls. In the final years of the show he grew a beard and became a shop teacher. This is not a cool person. How depressing." --Paul Mather, Depression

"The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night."

--Longfellow

"One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire." --John W. Foster

"The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials." --Chinese Proverb

"Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:

When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, 'How would the Lone Ranger have handled this?'"

"There's no sauce in the world like hunger." --Miguel de Cervantes

"Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code." --unknown

"It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds." --William Ellery Channing

"Hey, hey, hey. Don't be mean. We don't have to be mean because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are." --Buckaroo Banzai

"A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives the rose." --Chinese proverb

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." --Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice." --Abraham Lincoln

"The mark of a good party is that you wake up the next morning wanting to change your name and start a new life in different city." --Vance Bourjaily, "Esquire"

"Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers." --Tom Lehrer

"Life is mostly froth and bubble, /

Two things stand like stone, /

Kindness in another's trouble, /

Courage in your own."

--Adam Lindsay Gordon

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

"To know how to hide one's ability is great skill." --Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage." --Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow." --Edwin Way Teale

"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

"Logic is the beginning of wisdom -- not the end." --Leonard Nimoy as Spock

"Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral." --John Burroughs

"Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties." --Jules Renard

"It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts." --Gustave Flaubert

"Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have." --Edward Everett Hale

"The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." --Victor Hugo

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." --Plato

"Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance." --Alexander Pope

"The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but has no vision. --Helen Keller

"...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves." --Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

"Love is most nearly itself , when here and now cease to matter." --T.S. Eliot

"It is change, not love, that makes the world go round - love only keeps it populated." --Charles H. Brower

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" --Steven Wright

"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

"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

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." --Theodore Roosevelt

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks." --Tennessee Williams

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." --Hanlon's Razor

"I don't need time. What I need is a deadline." --Duke Ellington

"People hate as they love, unreasonably." --William Makepeace Thackeray

"A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal: Panama!" --a palindrome

"A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I'm afraid of widths." --Steven Wright

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." --Thomas Henry Huxley

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

"An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision." --James McNeill Whistler

"One thing about the rat race,

Even if you win it,

You're still a rat!" --Lily Tomlin

"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they 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, 1987 CSICOP keynote address

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

"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper." --Edmund Burke

"Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves." --Hermann Hesse

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." --Henry Adams

"If you ever see me getting beaten by the police, put down the video camera and come help me." --Bobcat Goldthwait

"I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three." --Elayne Boosler

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."" --H. L. Mencken

"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson

"Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly." --Voltaire

"The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance." --Thomas Jefferson

"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

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" --Abraham Lincoln

"There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners; the sinners who believe themselves righteous." --Blaise Pascal

"In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person." --Margaret Anderson

"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." --Peter De Vries

"When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become." --Louis Pasteur

"Man is like a fly riding on the trunk of an elephant and thinking that he's steering. The elephant doesn't mind and it makes the ride more interesting." --unknown

"When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other." --Chinese proverb

"The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself." --Robert Green Ingersoll

"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government." --Franklin D. Roosevelt

"He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." --Thomas Paine

"The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." --Thomas Huxley

"Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company." --Rachel Naomi Remen

"So here's a picture of reality: (picture of circle with lots of sqiggles in it) As we all know, reality is a mess." --Larry Wall, Open Sources

"Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head." --unknown

"Do more than exist, live. Do more than touch, feel. Do more than look, observe. Do more than read, absorb. Do more than hear, listen. Do more than listen, understand. Do more than think, ponder. Do more than talk, say something." --John Rhoades

"Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war." --Isaac Asimov

"He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own." --Confucius

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

"Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose." --Garrison Keillor

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." --Schopenhauer

"Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them." --Philip Dormer Stanhope

"Assumptions are the termites of relationships." --Henry Winkler

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." --unknown

"To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare." --Kenko Yoshida

""The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." --T.H. White, The Once and Future King

"The tears of strangers are only water." --Russian proverb

"It's a fairly embarrassing situation to admit that we can't find 90 percent of the universe." --Bruce H. Margon, astrophysicist

"Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will never believe you anyway." --Elbert Hubbard

"Trees are not known by their leaves, nor even by their blossoms, but by their fruits." --Eleanor of Aquitaine

"You're not making Christianity better, you're making Rock and Roll worse." --Hank Hill, on Christian rock

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." --Henry David Thoreau

"One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs -- but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelette." --Professor Charles P. Issawi

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." --Philip K. Dick

"One can pay back the loan of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind." --Malayan Proverb

"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." --Winston Churchill

"They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea." --Francis Bacon

"He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak." --Michel De Montaigne

"No one so thoroughly appreciates the value of constructive criticism as the one who's giving it." --Hal Chadwick

"Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks." --Phillips Brooks

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." --Carl Jung

"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come." --Carl Sandburg

"What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give." --P.D. James

"We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty." --John Ruskin

"I was never less alone than when by myself." --Edward Gibbon

"If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank." --Woody Allen

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." --Alan Kay

"Words are the soul's ambassadors, who go / Abroad upon her errands to and fro." --James Howell

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." --Crowfoot

"No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." --John Donne

"Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; / So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, / Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults." --Socrates

"You are only given a little madness. Don't lose it." --Robin Williams

"Wish not to seem, but to be, the best." --Aeschylus

"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds." --Edward Abbey

"To err is human... To eat a muskrat is not." --unknown

"Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend." --Alexander Pope

"Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none." --Doug Larson

"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds." --"George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans)

"I treasure this strange combination found in very few persons: a fierce desire for life as well as a lucid perception of the ultimate futility of the quest." --Madeleine Gobeil

"When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues." --Honore de Balzac

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

"There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible." --Marcel Proust

"Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind." --Albert Schweitzer

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; Some blunders and absurdities crept in; Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects." --J. William Fulbright

"I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'" --Garrison Keillor

"To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness." --Confucius

"Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool." --Kelvin Throop III

"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up." --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." --Heraclitus

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'" --Charlie Brown by Charles Schulz

"If you are planning for one year, grow rice. If you are planning for 20 years, grow trees. If you are planning for centuries, grow men." --Chinese proverb

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

"I filled out an application that said, 'In Case Of Emergency Notify.' I wrote 'Doctor'... What's my mother going to do?" --Stephen Wright

"Blessed are they that have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it." --James Russell Lowell

"To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy." --Hippocrates

"What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul." --Jewish proverb

"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." --Garrison Keillor

"One of my colleagues advised me to use PowerPoint when you don't want to answer any questions." --Prof. Ames

"Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well -- he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is like a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use." --Charles Schultz

"Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose." --Beverly Nichols

"The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms. Everything is more beautiful when they have passed." --Suzanne Necker

"I can still hear their jeering taunts, 'Hey, there goes Al the accordion player'. Well look where they are now, they're working at the 7-11. And me? I SHOP at the 7-11". --"Weird Al" Yankovic

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." --Pericles

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." --Eric Hoffer

"There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully." --Ellen Goodman

"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time." --Carl Sagan

"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

"There is pleasure in the pathless woods, /

There is rapture in the lonely shore, /

There is society where none intrudes, /

By the deep sea, and music in its roar: /

I love not man the less, but nature more." --Lord Byron

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." --Galileo Galilei

"A priest advised Voltaire on his death bed to renounce the devil.

Replied Voltaire, 'This is no time to make new enemies.'" --unknown

"Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness." --Henrik Ibsen

"You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame." --Erica Jong

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

"I saved Latin -- what did YOU do!?!" --Max Fischer, character in the film Rushmore

"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer." --Saadi

"When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." --John F. Kennedy

"God was my copilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him." --unknown

"Jesus saves. The others take 2d20 crushing damage." --unknown

"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

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair

"Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth." --Richard Whately

"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top." --An English Professor, Ohio University, to a student

"A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist." --Louis Nizer

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" --Cicero

"The IRS sent back my tax return saying I owed $800. I said 'If you'll notice, I sent a paper clip with my return. Given what you've been paying for things lately, that should more than make up the difference.'" --Emo Philips

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." --Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one." --Henry Miller

"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother." --Theodore M. Hesburgh

"Raising kids is part joy and part guerilla warfare." --Ed Asner

"I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness." --Steve Martin

"A man is not old until his regrets take the place of dreams." --Yiddish proverb

"What does it mean to die? It may be that man has a hundred senses, and at his death only the five that are known to us perish, and the other ninety-five go on living." --unknown

"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 B. Anthony

"The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct." --Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven." --Edward De Bono

"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

"Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief." --William Faulkner

"Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash." --Jerry Seinfeld

"Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within." --Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose." --Chinese proverb

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us." --Paul Valery

"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

"A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes." --Mark Twain

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." --Charles Darwin

"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense." --Mark Twain

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

"I always knew that I'd look back at my tears and laugh, but I never thought that I'd look back at my laughter and cry." --unknown

"This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted." --Juvenal

"No one regards what is before his feet; we all gaze at the stars." --Quintus Ennius

"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

"What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet?" --Tom Galloway

"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday." --Alexander Pope

"Love is like Soy sauce. Marriage is like Tofu. When mixed together they make something a little bland for most people, but awfully good for you especially if pregnant." --Robert Guaraldi

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." --Voltaire

"The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it." --Woodrow Wilson

"Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members." --Pearl S. Buck

"A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war." --Herbert V. Prochnow

"The living language is like a cow-path: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay." --E.B. White

"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." --Giorgos Seferis

"If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further." --Mahatma Gandhi

"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry' ..." --Gary Larson, The Far Side

"That man is truly good who knows his own dark places." --Beowulf

"The Hollow Men: Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow." --T.S. Eliot

"A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day." --Emily Dickinson

"The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us."--Mario Cuomo

"The buck stops here." --Harry S. Truman

"A well-known speaker started off his seminar by holding up a $20 bill. In the room of 200, he asked, 'Who would like this $20 bill?' Hands started going up. He said he was going to give the $20 to one of them but first, he proceeded to crumple up the $20 bill. He then asked who still wanted it. Still the hands were up in the air. Well, he replied, 'What if I do this?' And he dropped it on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe. He picked it up, now crumpled and dirty. 'Now who still wants it?' Still the hands went into the air. 'My friends, you have all learned a very valuable lesson. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it did not decrease in value. It was still worth $20. Many times in our lives, we are dropped, crumpled,and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make and the circumstances that come our way. We feel as though we are worthless. But no matter what has happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value: dirty or clean, crumpled or finely creased, you are still priceless to those who love you. 'The worth of our lives come not in what we do or whom we know, but by WHO WE ARE. You are special -- don't ever forget it.'" -unknown

"No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back." --Turkish proverb

"It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell. " --William Tecumseh Sherman

"She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to."--Gypsy Rose Lee

"Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?" --C. S. Lewis

"Where there are no men of honor, strive to be a man of honor, so that others may learn from your example."--Ethics of the Fathers

"After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, 'No hablo ingles.'"--Ronnie Shakes

"Virtue is its own revenge." --E.Y. Harburg

"The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face."--Sydney J. Harris

"Only when observed is nature forced to choose only one path, so only then is just one path taken." -Unknown

"The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter. "--Joshua Reynolds

"So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy." --Roger Baldwin

"If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money." --Abigail Van Buren

"May you be poor in misfortune,

Rich in blessings,

Slow to make enemies,

And quick to make friends.

But rich or poor, quick or slow,

May you know nothing but happiness

From this day forward."--Irish toast

"The person who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance." --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever. " --Lord Chesterfield

"Be compassionate and never forget how to love
Think inclusively
Reclaim noble values such as truth, honesty, honour, courage.
Respect one's elders and look to what they have to teach you
Be empathetic
Look after the less fortunate in society.
Promote and protect diversity
Respect the gifts of the natural world.
Set your goals high and take pride in what you do.
Cherish and look after your body, and, as the ancient Greeks believed, your mind will serve you better
Put back into the community as there have been those before you have done the same and you are reaping what they sowed.
Participate in and protect democracy. It does not thrive as a spectator sport.
Undertake due diligence in everything
Seek balance and space, and solitude.
Don't be afraid to feel passionate about something
Learn to be an advocate and an ambassador for good
Be mindful of your limitations.
Indulge and nurture your curiosity as it will keep you vital
Take charge of your life and don't fall into the pit of entitlement.
Assume nothing and take nothing for granted
Things are not necessarily what they seem." -Loreena McKennitt

"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

"To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life." --John Burroughs

"Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand." --Emily Kimbrough

"There is a field beyond all notions of right and wrong. Come, meet me there." --Rumi


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Last updated 14 December 2005 by KSM.