Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.

Dan Barker

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!

Tom Lehrer

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

Nora Roberts

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Charles M. Schulz

You see, I had this space suit.

How it happened was this way:

"Dad," I said, "I want to go to the Moon."

"Certainly," he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.

I said, "Dad, please! I'm serious."

This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, "I said it was all right. Go ahead."

"Yes...but how?"

"Eh?" He looked mildly surprised. "Why, that's your problem, Clifford."

Robert A. Heinlein

"I mean," continued Judiciary Pag, gazing round the ultramodern (this was ten billion years ago, when ultramodern meant lots of stainless steel and brushed concrete) and huge courtroom, "these guys are just obsessed."

This, too, was true, and is the only explanation anyone has yet managed to come up with for the unimaginable speed with which the people of Krikkit had pursued their new and absolute purpose—the destruction of everything that wasn't Krikkit.

Douglas Adams

"Moral experts" would also constitute an elite group, and the existence of such experts is completely in line with my argument.

Sam Harris

"Nothing like it," Rez said, and Lanev turned, to see the singer emerging from the Western World, brushing something white from his dark jacket. "That physical thing. Too much time in the virtual, we forget that, don't we?"

William Gibson

"Piecemeal" supernaturalism would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which to-day is supposed to reign only among uneducated people...It admits miracles and providential leanings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the real world's details.

William James

"Supernatural" is a null word.

-From "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"

Robert Heinlein

"You still don't understand" the Gray Voice droned on. "There is no time, there is no space. What was, is, and ever shall be. You are you, playing chess with yourself, and again you have checkmated yourself. You are the referee. Morals are your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules. To thine own self be true or you spoil the game"

"Crazy"

"Then vary the rules and play a different game. You cannot exhaust her infinite variety"

"If you would just let me look at your face" Lazarus muttered pettishly.

"Try a mirror"

Robert A. Heinlein

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

Kurt Vonnegut

A law was made a distant moon ago here,
July and August cannot be too hot,
And there's a legal limit to the snow here,
In Camelot...

Lerner and Loewe

A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.

Robert Oxton Bolton

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.

Robert Benchley, Chips Off the Old Benchley

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

Granville Hicks

A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine...

C.S. Lewis

...a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times, more labour than the greater part of those who work...

Adam Smith

A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.

Lois McMaster Bujold

A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong.

Piet Hein

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

Terry Pratchett

A mother understands what a child does not say.

Jewish Proverb

A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

A philosopher once said 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results'. Well, they do not. You set up the circumstances, with the same conditions every time, and you cannot predict behind which hole you will see the electron.

Richard Feynman

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

George Wald

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property.

G. K. Chesterton

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

"Correct. A rank of party workers has been created who enter the government and renounce their own opinions. Or at least any open expression of them. Every page on their desks comes from above. They behave as if the hierarchy had already created all party opinion and decisions. From this hierarchy, every decision affecting the country stands in the form of a command."

Barbara Kingsolver

I want a worldview that reconciles empiricism, performativity, and the ineffable.

I want it to be comprehensible and applicable with no more than a reasonable investment of study, without devoting years as an acolyte of a guru or a philosopher or a thesis advisor before the secret truths become clear.

I want it to arrive via email or my LJ friendslist, preferably within the next few days.

Is that so much to ask?

danima

For over 30 generations they lived in that land, remote from the rest of the world, content in the worship of Kane, until you came, and my people found themselves once more in a time when the gods were changing.

Dalton Trumbo & Daniel Taradash

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

John Ciardi

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Abortion is an issue that serves as a stand-in for the control of women's lives and for a moral hierarchy that conservatives want to impose.

George Lakoff, Howard Dean

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley, Music At Night

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!

Jerome K. Jerome

All for one, one for all!

Alexandre Dumas

All general statements are false.

Unknown

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw

All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came.

John F. Kennedy

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Noam Chomsky

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

Henry David Thoreau

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

Henry David Thoreau

All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.

Lord Byron

All you need is love.

John Lennon

Although a man must do right if it send him to Hades, yea, even were it to send him for ever to hell.

George MacDonald

America is always at its most powerful and most influential when it is combining innovation and inspiration, wealth-building and dignity-building, the quest for big profits and the tackling of big problems. When we do just one, we are less than the sum of our parts.

Thomas L. Friedman

America's rich did take a hit in the Crash of 2008. According to Forbes magazine, the nation's four hundred wealthiest people lost about $300 billion that year. That still left those four hundred enough to live on, though—a total of $1.27 trillion (more than the estimated cost of achieving universal health care for the entire nation for the next decade.)

Robert Reich

Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.

Edgar W. Howe

Among the Hadza, males are dominant over females and adults over sub-adults, but even in these two respects, the difference is slight compared to more complex societies. Some men are clearly much better hunters than others, but this does not result in a dominance hierarchy. Hunting reputation does seem to come closer than anything else to capturing what little status variation there is. There is also no clear hierarchy among adult females, although older women are afforded a little extra respect, as are older men.

Frank Marlowe

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

Niels Bohr

An important lesson of Enron is that deregulation made the accounting deception possible.

Greg Palast and Jerrold Oppenheim

An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.

Victor Hugo

Leonard had a stall, and a great big strong one,
Earnest had a manger, and its walls were thick,
George found a pen, but I think it was the wrong one,
And James sat down on a brick.

A. A. Milne

And at the end they traveled again.

There was a time when Arthur Dent would not. He said that the Bistromathic Drive had revealed to him that time and distance were one, that mind and Universe were one, that perception and reality were one and that the more one traveled the more one stayed in one place, and that what with one thing and another he would rather just stay put for a while and sort it all out in his mind, which was now at one with the Universe so it shouldn't take too long and he could get a good rest afterward, put in a little flying practice and learn to cook, which he had always meant to do.

Douglas Adams

"And that's why I got polio?"

"Yes, dear. Your leg is part of the battle-in-the-heavenlies. You are like a soldier who got wounded. It was during The Year Of Testing, but, by God's Grace, we all came through, and your father did not lose his faith, though he certainly fell into the temptation of doubt. Poor Fran."

Frank Schaeffer

And the old stories of the Hebrews are so compelling and appealing that they also became the foundation of Christianity and Islam...

R. Crumb

And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

Kurt Vonnegut

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

Harriet Lerner

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

Any honest plan will do in Fairyland, if you only stick to it.

George MacDonald

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.

Plato

Anybody who could turn Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, incinerate Sodom and Gomorrah and make it rain for forty days and forty nights has got to be a fun guy.

Larry Gelbart

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

Robert Benchley, The Benchley Roundup

Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.

E. H. Gombrich

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.

Franz Kafka

Are these bogus moralizers trying to deceive themselves as well as the rest of us? Or are they simply relying on the willingness of millions of Americans to be duped?

Joe Conason

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Bertrand Russell, Impact of Science on Society

As I discuss in my book Moral Politics, conservative and progressive politics are organized around two very different models of married life: a strict father family and a nurturing parent family. The strict father is the moral authority and master of the household, dominating the mother and children and imposing needed discipline. Contemporary conservative politics turns these family values into political values: hierarchical authority, individual discipline, military might...The nurturant parent model has two equal parents, whose job is to nurture their children and teach their children to nurture others. Nurturance has two dimensions: empathy and responsibility, for oneself and others. Responsibility requires strength and competence. The strong nurturing parent is protective and caring, builds trust and connection, promotes family happiness and fulfillment, fairness, freedom, openness, cooperation, community development. These are the values of strong progressive politics.

George Lakoff

As Pollitt points out, backing down on abortion rights because those opposed to them are so "passionate" is a way of rewarding terrorism. And the terrorism of the anti-choice movement is just as real as the terrorism of those who bombed the World Trade Center.

Molly Ivins

As inequality has widened, money flowing from large corporations, Wall Street, and their executives and traders has increasingly distorted political decision making.

Robert B. Reich

As my old pappy used to say, if at first you don't succeed, try something else.

Brett Maverick

As the authorities of Cambridge University had put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down.

G. K. Chesterton

As the law stands now, [hedge-fund manager's] income is considered "carried interest," and is accordingly taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent.
According to former labor secretary Robert Reich, in 2009 "the 25 most successful hedge-fund managers earned a billion dollars each."...Closing this outrageous loophole would bring in close to $20 billion in revenue—money desperately needed at a time when teachers and nurses and firemen are being laid off all around the country.

Arianna Huffington

As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty, that there should be diversity of religious opinions among us...

Thomas Paine

At Festivus, that time of year
When clock and bag are signs of cheer
And mystery of life is clear
Then come we all together here
To sing of love, and never fear.

Daniel O'Keefe

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.

Jesus

At the same time that Falwell called on his followers to "take back" the culture, evangelical minister and author Jim Wallis urged believers to "Take Back the Faith," that had been "Co-opted by the Right."

Frank Lambert

At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln

Barack Obama could be... a president who profoundly alters American politics and the role of government in American life—one who uses his office to appeal to our best selves to change our economy, society, and democracy for the better.

Robert Kuttner

Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars.

Serbian proverb

Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

Lewis Carroll

Beauty often seduces us on the road to truth.

David Shore

Because Americans generally failed to consider seriously why we had been attacked on 9/11, the Bush administration was able to respond in a way that made the situation far worse. I believed at the time and feel no differently five years later that we should have treated the attacks as crimes against the innocent, not as acts of war.

Chalmers Johnson

Beck's summer-long multimedia campaign centered on three lies. When the White House tapped Jones to advise on green jobs, he was neither a self-avowed communist nor a black nationalist.

Beck also twisted and then disregarded the known facts of Jones's 1992 arrest. He said that Jones had been arrested for participation in the 1992 Los Angeles riots and was a "convicted felon." Both claims were false.

The easily accessible truth was that Jones was arrested while working as a volunteer legal monitor during a protest in San Francisco. Never mentioned by Beck was the fact that the state of California later declared Jones's arrest unlawful. After an investigation and a hearing, the state dropped all charges against Jones and awarded him a settlement.

Alexander Zaitchik

Before Allied took over, the Bendix board granted Agee a $4.1-million severance, paid for by the company's shareholders. Thus was the public introduced to the odious concept of the golden parachute, part of the new ethos of greed permeating Wall Street and corporate America in the 1980's

William Kleinknecht

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

Aesop

Beware of the man who won't be bothered with details.

William Feather

Both bands and tribes elicited a predictable political reaction when they were discovered by early explorers or ethnographers. These small local groups had no leaders with any real authority; in contrast to the societies of their discoverers, every individual seemed to come and go just as he or she pleased. It became clear that when people live in small, locally autonomous groups, they are almost always "equalitarian."

Christopher Boehm

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born...

G.K. Chesterton

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

Dorothy Parker

But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me...unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.

C.S. Lewis

But government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

Henry David Thoreau

"But he told you that he loved you."

"Yes—no—never absolutely. It was every day implied, but never
professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been—but it never
was."

Jane Austen

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

Albert Camus

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's,
When mercy seasons justice.

William Shakespeare

But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either.

Douglas Adams

But she was inside the wonderful garden and she could come through the door under the ivy any time and she felt as if she had found a world all her own.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them.

Walt Whitman

By consequence, when this year was instituted in Egypt, it started on the vernal equinox.

Sir Isaac Newton

California: The west coast of Iowa.

Joan Didion

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

C. S. Lewis

Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Orrin Hatch, Republican senator

Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet, you can't win.

Robert A. Heinlein

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self respect springs.

Joan Didion

Character is fate.

Heraclitus

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Raymond Chandler

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Come back in a hundred years, and if we haven't returned to living in caves and killing one another with clubs, we will have some scientifically astute things to say about ethics.

Sam Harris

Conflation accomplished.

Al Franken

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.

Jesus

Conversely the degradation of art has never been more apparent. And the most widespread form of degradation...is kitsch, that peculiar disease which we can instantly recognize but never precisely define, and whose Austro-German name links it to the mass movements and crowd sentiments of the twentieth century.

Roger Scruton

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Ambrose Bierce

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.

Thomas Paine

DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set.

Ambrose Bierce

Dawkins brings a flood of light and fresh air, and shows us that there is a dazzling clarity to the structure of evolution that is breathtaking when we suddenly see it. And if we don't see it, then, quite literally, we don't know the first thing about who we are and where we come from.

Douglas Adams, "The Book That Changed Me" in The Salmon of Doubt

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

Mitch Albom

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

Frank Herbert

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

Robert Byrne

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

Marcel Proust

Devise rules and policies to control your employees' unruly inclinations. Teach them skills and competencies to fill in the traits they lack. All of your best efforts as a manager should focus on either muzzling or correcting what nature saw fit to provide.

Great managers reject this out of hand.

Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

J. K. Rowling

Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Dirk Gently, hired by someone he never meets, to do a job that is never specified, starts following people at random. His investigations lead him to Los Angeles, through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos. Jokes, lightly poached fish, and the emergent properties of complex systems form the background to Dirk Gently's most baffling and incomprehensible case.

Douglas Adams

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

The Buddha

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

George Bernard Shaw

Rosencrantz: Do you think death could possibly be a boat?

Guildenstern: No, no, no...Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.

Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.

Guildenstern: No, no, no - what you've been is not on boats.

Tom Stoppard

The most famous is the Gadsden Flag, which featured a bright yellow field with the slogan "Don't Tread on Me" near a coiled rattler.

Kevin Keim and Peter Keim

Don't judge a book by its cover.

Ray Bradbury

Don't you see the irony?
Yes, I see it.
I really don't think you see it.
Felix, I'm telling you, I see the irony of it.
Then tell me—what's the irony?
The irony is that unless we come to some other arrangement, I'm going to kill you.

Neil Simon

Drawing is not really difficult. Seeing is the problem, or, to be more specific, shifting to a particular way of seeing.

Betty Edwards

But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

Mark Twain

Dreams are postcards from our subconscious, inner self to outer self, right brain trying to cross that moat to the left. Too often they come back unread: "return to sender, addressee unknown." That's a shame because it's a whole other world out there--or in here depending on your point of view.

Dennis Koenig and Jordan Budde

During the Great Prosperity, government enforced the basic bargain—using Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment, giving ordinary workers more bargaining power, providing social insurance, and expanding public investment. Consequently, the share of the total income that went to the middle class grew, while the portion going to the top declined. But here's the interesting thing: Because the economy expanded so buoyantly, just about everyone came out ahead—including those at the top.

Robert Reich

EXULT, each patriot heart! -- this night is shewn
A piece, which we may fairly call our own;
Where the proud titles of "My Lord! Your Grace!"
To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.

Royall Tyler

Each incoming president has the above seal branded on his upper right shoulder upon taking office. It is said that those who cry during the branding are fated to be one-termers.

Jon Stewart, The Writers of The Daily Show

Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though, perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturb them.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.

Groucho Marx

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

Woody Allen

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

Tom Stoppard

Even the phrase "war on terrorism" was a misnomer, a rhetorical device, an emotive manipulation of the public's horror after 9/11.

Ahmed Rashid

Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

Gail Pool

Eventually, it was decided that he really knew nothing and he was allowed to live. First, however, he was forced to falsely confess to his "crimes" on video, which he accepted to avoid more torture. Based on this confession, he was serving time in prison. The American advisor never returned or interceded in any way.

Jennifer K. Harbury

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Thomas H. Huxley

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

Simone Weil

FREEMASONS, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucious, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids -- always by a Freemason.

Ambrose Bierce

Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true.

Matt Selman and David X. Cohen

Facts are the enemy of truth.

Dale Wasserman

Faith is resolutely believing that which  you know to be false.

Dorothy Sayers

Faith, noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Ambrose Bierce

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

G.K. Chesterton

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Plato

Family values is about lending a helping hand, not swinging a foot, to those who are down. It is about paychecks. It is about security. It is about hope.

James Carville

Far from scrabbling endlessly and desperately for food, hunter-gatherers are among the best-fed people on earth, and they manage this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work—which makes them among the most leisured people on earth as well. In his book on stone age economics, Marshall Sahlins described them as 'the original affluent society.'

Daniel Quinn

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell

Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Frank Herbert

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Mark Twain

Finally, inequality is not a natural feature of human societies. As the readings in part I of this book make clear, immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies were "aggressively egalitarian"...These societies worked because of, not in spite of, the fact that power and authority were kept in check. Inequality as a result of human nature is another side of the cultural myth of economic man.

John Gowdy

For John Caputo, hermeneutics means radical thinking without transcendental justification: attending to the ruptures and irregularities in existence before the metaphysics of presence has a chance to smooth them over. Radical Hermeneutics forges a closer collaboration between the hermeneutics and deconstruction than has previously been attempted

ad for 'Radical Hermeneutics'

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

For example, social dominators freely admit on tests that measure moral issues of right and wrong behavior that such matters are irrelevant to them... Altemeyer noted that "social dominators believe that a really good skill to develop is the ability to look someone straight in the face and lie convincingly...

John W. Dean

For five years before his election as president, Reagan had been regaling audiences with tales of "the welfare queen," the Chicago woman who he said "had eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veterans' benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. ... Her tax-free income is over $150,000" It was not just the baldest demagoguery but also a gross distortion of the facts. The woman, Linda Taylor, had been convicted in 1977 of using two aliases to collect checks totaling $8,000. But the anecdote was a powerful tool for arousing the anger of white working-class and middle-class voters who were coping with tough economic times. Indeed, Reagan found it so compelling that he continued using it in the White House, even after the press had revealed it to be a false-hood.

William Kleinknecht

For he is not besmirched with the Moral Sense, but is as the angels are, and knows no wrong, and never does it.

Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger .

"For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

Adolf Hitler

For the two ways of contemplation are like the two ways of action so frequently mentioned by the ancients; the one plain and easy at first, but in the end impassable; the other rough and fatiguing in the entrance, but soon after fair and even: so in contemplation, if we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.

Francis Bacon

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Nelson Mandela

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.

Horace

He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw

Forsake not an old friend,
For the new is not comparable to him.
A new friend is as new wine,
when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure.

The Bible

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

George Carlin

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

George said, "God is short and fat."
Nick said, "No, He's tall and lean."
Len said, "With a long white beard."
"No," said John, "He's shaven clean."
Will said, "He's black," Bob said, "He's white."
Rhonda Rose said, "He's a She.
I smiled but never showed 'em all
The autographed photograph God sent to me.

Shel Silverstein

Get up, stand up
Stand up for your rights
Get up, stand up
Don't give up the fight.

Bob Marley

Give neither advice nor salt, until you are asked for it.

English Proverb

Given the success of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, New York Post, American Spectator, Weekly Standard, New York Sun, National Review, Commentary, and so on, no sensible person can dispute the existence of a "conservative media." The reader might be surprised to learn that neither do I quarrel with the notion of a "liberal media." It is tiny and profoundly underfunded compared to its conservative counterpart, but it does exist.

Eric Alterman

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Terry Pratchett

God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

Alan Watts

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.

Izaak Walton

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Henry David Thoreau

Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.

Chester Bowles

2 is not equal to three, not even for large values of 2.

Grabel

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.

Cicero

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech is cantankerous.

Chuang-tzu

Grover Norquist, the antitax advocate who has been described as the "field marshal" of the tax-cut drive, is best known for saying, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Paul Krugman

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Hail to you gods, on that day of the great reckoning. Behold me, I have come to you, without sin, without guilt, without evil, without a witness against me, without one whom I have wronged. I am one pure of mouth, pure of hands.

The Book of the Dead, The Address to the Gods, 1700-1000 B.C.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Aldous Huxley, "Distractions I"

He asked each of us one simple question: "Why are you here?" The answers were predictable, ranging from "For the challenge" to My platoon sergeant made me." I admitted with the other infantry officers that I hadn't had a choice.

"Wrong answer, Ranger," he said to each person before addressing the group. "You are here for one reason." He paused for effect. "You are here for the troops you are going to lead...This is for them..."

Craig M. Mullaney

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Douglas Adams

He had made an arrangement with one of the cockerels to call him in the mornings half an hour earlier than anyone else, and would put in some volunteer labour at whatever seemed to be most needed, before the regular day's work began. His answer to every problem, every setback, was "I will work harder!"—which he had adopted as his personal motto.

George Orwell

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

Douglas Adams

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

George Bernard Shaw

He was as fresh as is the month of May.

Geoffrey Chaucer

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Health is worth more than learning.

Thomas Jefferson

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Redd Foxx

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

George Bernard Shaw

Hell, there are no rules here—we're trying to accomplish something.

Thomas Edison (as quoted by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee)

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

James Thurber

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Kurt Vonnegut

Here is an alarming example. I had a pupil...[who]...became a schoolmaster... happening to be in Oxford, he paid me a visit... He was completely disillusioned about state-control. The interferences of the Ministry of Education with schools and schoolmasters, he had found arrogant, ignorant, and intolerable: sheer tyranny... Then, suddenly, the real purpose of his visit was revealed...could I—had I any influence—would I pull any wires to get him a job—in the Ministry of Education?

C.S. Lewis

Here's looking at you, kid.

Humphrey Bogart

Heresy, the denial of accepted truth, is not comprehensible in a polytheistic milieu. Nor is it possible, since polytheistic religions tend to be experiential and are not creedal. Truth is a matter of personal experience and, to varying degrees in different cultures, accordingly varies from person to person. My truth need not be your truth, but this does not in any way challenge nor imperil my truth or your truth.

Jordan D. Paper

His honesty proceeds from the heart as well as the head, and therefore may be more surely counted on.

Thomas Jefferson

Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.

Mitch Albom

Home. If cornbread, even momentarily, takes us back to the home we had, or the home we wish we had had, or the best parts of the home we did have, no wonder it is powerful. No wonder we want to tell our stories. And no wonder cornbread tastes so very good to us...

Crescent Dragonwagon

Homemade stilts were a common sight, so teenagers became adept at using them.

Mary Labutta

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

Thomas Jefferson, Letters

Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.

George Carlin

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?

Woody Allen

How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!

Friedrich Nietzsche

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Henry David Thoreau

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Adams

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

Thomas Paine, Collected Writings

I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

Charles Lamb

I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead.

Plato (quoting Socrates)

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.

Fritz Perls

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

Thomas Jefferson

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.

Dan Quayle

I care for riches, to make gifts
To friends, or lead a sick man back to health
With ease and plenty.
Else small aid is wealth
For daily gladness; once a man be done
With hunger, rich and poor are all as one.

Euripides

I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought I'd rather dance with the cows until you come home.

Groucho Marx

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Lewis Carroll

I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in, or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.

John McCain

I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.

Saint Teresa of Avila

I would not want to be misunderstood on this. I do not have a Pollyanna view of human nature. I am quite aware that out of defensiveness and inner fear individuals can and do behave in ways which are incredibly cruel, horribly destructive, immature, regressive, antisocial, hurtful. Yet one of the most refreshing and invigorating parts of my experience is to work with such individuals and to discover the strongly positive directional tendencies which exist in them, as in all of us, at the deepest levels.

Carl Rogers

I don't know how to have casual conversation. You think you're talking about one thing, and either you are and it's incredibly boring, or you're not because it's subtext and you need a decoder ring.

Sara B. Cooper

No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

George Bush, to Robert Sherman of American Atheist Press, at the Chicago airport while announcing federal disaster relief for Illinois

I don't like it and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

Erwin Schrodinger, commenting on Schrodinger's equations

I dream, therefore I become.

Cheryl Renée Grossman

I had stumbled onto something big, a symbiotic relationship that would help create a highly profitable, right-wing Big Lie machine that flourished in book publishing, on talk radio, and on the Internet through the '90s.

David Brock

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

I have come to know men most deeply in a relationship which is characterized by all that I can give of safety, absence of threat, and complete freedom to be and to choose. In such a relationship men express all kinds of bitter and murderous feelings, abnormal impulses, bizarre and antisocial desires. But as they live in such a relationship, expressing and being more of themselves, I find that man, like the lion, has a nature. My experience is that he is a basically trustworthy member of the human species, whose deepest characteristics tend toward development, differentiation, cooperative relationships;  whose life tends fundamentally to move from dependence to independence; whose impulses tend narurally to harmonize into a complex and changing pattern of self-regulation; whose total character is such as to tend to preserve and enhance himself and his species, and perhaps to move it toward its further evolution.

Carl Rogers

I have found you an argument: but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Samuel Johnson

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education

Mark Twain

...I just looked 'round and he's gone.

Didn't you love the things that they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
And we'll be free
Some day soon, and it's a-gonna be one day...

Dick Holler

Later Hack Hagen became active in national Lutheran church efforts to counsel conscientious objectors during Vietnam. As a World War II veteran, far from being bitter toward those who chose not to serve in Vietnam, he says, "I learned about compassion."

Tom Brokaw

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant.
An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent.

Dr. Seuss

I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.

Augusten Burroughs

I never said 'The superman exists and he's American.' What I said was 'God exists and he's American.'

Alan Moore

I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.

Fran Lebowitz

I only know two pieces; one is 'Clair de Lune' and the other one isn't.

Victor Borge

I recently counseled a young couple about their upcoming marriage. He is a convinced fundamentalist Christian, and she is a convinced secular humanist... As he sat in my office holding hands wiht his fiancé, he said, "I hate to think of my wife going to hell, but I didn't make up the rules. God did in the Bible."

I don't believe in that God.

Gary A. Wilburn

I remember my grandfather handing me his dog-tags from his time in Patton's Army, and understanding that his defense of this country marked one of his greatest sources of pride. That's my idea of America. I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, listening to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence... That's my idea of America.

Barack Obama

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.

Shirley Temple

I think contraception is disgusting - people using each other for pleasure.

Joseph Schiedler, Director, Pro-Life Action League

I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front. That price isn't the drudgery that many people think. In high season I give over a few Saturdays to canning with family or friends. A steamy canning kitchen full of women discussing our stuff is not so different from your average book group, except that we end up with jars of future meals.

Barbara Kingsolver

I think we've got to admit the possibility that we are not always right, that our particular faith may not have all the monopoly on truth, and we've got to be able to listen to other people. You know I think one of the trends we are seeing right now, and which I think is causing so much political grief both domestically and internationally, is that absolutism has become sort of the flavor of the day.

Barack Obama

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

Richard Feynman

I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the missed sessions.

Woody Allen

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Woody Allen

I was the kid next door's imaginary friend.

Emo Phillips

I won't say I'm no better than anybody else, but I'll be danged if I ain't just as good.

Rodgers and Hammerstein

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

E. B. White

I write about political egalitarianism of the type Tocqueville described, specifically about its origins. But it was not Americans, two centuries ago, who invented this interesting political way of life; nor was it the Athenians of ancient Greece. The "democratic" origins I describe are not recent and historical, but evolutionary and ancient. They date from well back in the Paleolithic era, and were intimately involved with the development of human nature itself.

Christopher Boehm

I'm a godmother, that's a great thing to be, a godmother. She calls me god for short, that's cute, I taught her that.

Ellen DeGeneres

Costello: I'm asking YOU who's on first.

Abbott: That's the man's name.

Costello: That's who's name?

Abbott: Yes.

Abbott and Costello

Hey! Get me! I'm handin' out wings!

Nick the Bartender

I'm leaving on a jet plane,
Don't know when I'll be back again...

Mary Travers

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.

A. Whitney Brown

I've set in motion a geometric inevitability. If I start chiseling there, chipping here, the whole form is compromised.

David Assael

I, for one, fear that if we don't subject religion to such scrutiny now, and work out together whatever revisions and reforms are called for, we will pass on a legacy of ever more toxic forms of religion to our descendants.

Daniel C. Dennett

If America is the agent of God, then America's enemies—whether internal or external—must be the agents of Satan. This cosmic duality has served American politicians well, particularly in times of conflict and war...

Reza Aslan

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Voltaire

If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.

Albert Einstein

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

Woody Allen

If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

Charlotte Bronte

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he is evil. I think that the worst thing you could say is that he is, basically, an under-achiever.

Woody Allen

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

Aristotle

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

Aristotle

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Albert Einstein

If the ground of democracy is truth, the ground of dictatorship is assertion. In a dictatorship, reality belongs to whoever has the greatest power to assert.

Naomi Wolf

If the people who make the decisions are the people who will also bear the consequences of those decisions, perhaps better decisions will result.

John Abrams

If there are psychological laws that govern human well-being, knowledge of these laws would provide an enduring basis for an objective morality.

Sam Harris

If there is, in fact, a Heaven and a Hell, all we know for sure is that Hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix...

Hunter S. Thompson

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Albert Einstein

The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.

Bertrand Russell

If you fail to admit you have a problem, that's when you really have a problem.

Lou "One of corporate America's living legends" Pritchett

If you want to be free, there is but one way: it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.

Carl Schurz

If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.

Yugoslav Proverb

If you're not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work.

John Alejandro King

Ignorance of the past has bred contempt for the lessons which the past might teach. Men prefer to repeat the old experiment without knowing that they repeat it.

George Santayana

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

George Bernard Shaw

In 2009, more than 13,700 registered lobbyists spent a record $3.5 billion swaying government policy the special interests' way, double the amount lobbyists spent as recently as 2002.

Arianna Huffington

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Friedrich Nietzsche

"In a free government," wrote Madison in Federalist No. 51, "the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects."

Gordon S. Wood

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

George Orwell

In comparing modern thought with ancient records, we must remember the difficulties...of any thinker battling with the verbal expression of thought which penetrates below the ordinary usages of the market place. For instance, how differently would Aristotle...read if we persisted in translating one of his...key words by the English term wood, and also insisted on giving the most literal meaning to that word.

Alfred North Whitehead

In fact, during Ford's darkest days, when the company's annual losses were being measured in billions of dollars, Ford had the courage to invest $3.5 billion to develop the Taurus—which has become the best-selling car in America.

Lou Pritchett

In its purest form, [peer production] is a way of producing goods and services that relies entirely on self-organizing, egalitarian communities of individuals who come together voluntarily to produce a shared outcome.

Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind.

Krishnamurti, Beginnings of Learning

In other words, that little Monopoly plutocrat in the top hat is back with a vengeance, grasping bags marked with dollar signs. He's still a Republican, he has a lot more money now, and he has probably become a patron of the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute.

Joe Conason

In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything. There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs.

Barbara Ehrenreich

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Mark Twain

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

Carl Sagan

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams

In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.

Ellen DeGeneres

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

In the heady years before the passage of proposition 13, California had been a high-tax state. In 1968 (which happened to be the year Schwarzenegger arrived as an immigrant and which he cited in his campaign as the golden age to which he would restore California), it was second in the nation in state and local tax collection as a percentage of personal income...

Peter Schrag

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not D.N.A.

Gregory Bateson

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Barack Obama

In the weeks afterward, even though he knew that his arm was gone, Tom could still feel its ghostly presence below the elbow. He could wiggle each "finger" "reach out" and "grab" objects that were within arm's reach. Indeed, his phantom arm seemed to be able to do anything that the real arm would have done automatically, such as warding off blows, breaking falls or patting his little brother on the back. Since Tom had been left-handed, his phantom would reach for the receiver when the telephone rang.

V. S. Ramachandran

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Douglas Adams

Interpreter: One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.

Ambrose Bierce

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Arthur C. Clarke

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity.

Seneca

It is a generation of towering achievement and modest demeaner, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order.

Tom Brokaw

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

- Konrad Lorenz

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

Thomas Paine

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

Alice Miller 

It is bad luck to be superstitious.

Andrew W. Mathis

It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.

James Thurber

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.

Woody Allen

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Graham Greene

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

H. L. Mencken

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curious of inquiry. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

Albert Einstein

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Henry David Thoreau

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Henry David Thoreau

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.

Carl Sagan

It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.

Rene Descartes

It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

J. K. Rowling

It is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public...

Barry Goldwater

It is true that I was born in Iowa, but I can't speak for my twin sister.

Abigail Van Buren

It is uncertain at what point in the life of an individual that sufficient maturity occurs so that one can take full responsibility for one's actions.

Paul Tillich

It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Robert Anton Wilson

Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?

Robert Bolt

It seems to give them a reason to be alive—to conquer "evil" when evil is what's thumping away in their own minds and hearts. Even their Bible says, "Thou shalt not eat of the the fruit of the tree of the 'knowledge' of good and evil," but they kept on eating that faulty knowledge.

Shirley MacLaine

It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.

Mark Twain

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

Terry Pratchett

It's only a bloody parking offence.

Monty Python

Judy, Judy, Judy...

Cary Grant

Kepler was convinced that during his mathematical exploration of the universe, he had "followed with sweat and panting the footprints of the Creator." Scientists had to cast aside everything they thought they knew and confront the unknown—in rather the same way as their contemporary John of the Cross encountered the unknown God, telling his readers: "To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not."

Karen Armstrong

Knowing what the Creator of the Universe believes about right and wrong inspires religious conservatives to enforce this vision in the public sphere at almost any cost; not knowing what is right—or that anything can ever be truly right—often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms with both hands.

Sam Harris

Abraham Lincoln

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

George Bernard Shaw

Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority.

Harlan Ellison, L.Q. Jones, Wayne Cruseturner

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Noam Chomsky

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.

Noah Webster

Language provides the foundation for history, planning, and social control. However, with language come rumors, lies, propaganda, stereotypes, and coercive rules. Our remarkable creative genius leads to great literature, drama, music, science, and inventions like the computer and the Internet. Yet that same creativity can be perverted into inventing torture chambers and torture tactics, into paranoid ideologies and the Nazis' efficient system of mass murder.

Philip Zimbardo

Cheney... brings Armey in… and he lays out a big stack of papers and he says, ‘Let me explain to you what’s really going on. … Saddam's much more dangerous than we want to tell the public.’ He told Armey two things he never said in public and that are not true. He said Saddam personally, and his family, had direct ties with al Qaeda. And he said Iraq was making substantial progress towards a miniature nuclear weapon.

Barton Gellman

Liberty Lobby is known to all who have eyes to see as an anti-Semitic tabloid which, at least as far as I am concerned, lies with lascivious regularity. (Did you know that Hitler's Holocaust was a Jewish hoax?) Think what you will of American Conservatism, but pray do not confuse it with that pestilential sheet.

William F. Buckley Jr.

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority--literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.

Ignazio Silone

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

George Bernard Shaw

Lies are like children: they're hard work, but it's worth it because the future depends on them.

Pam Davis

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Kurt Vonnegut

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

e e cummings, 100 Selected Poems

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.

John Lennon

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

Octavio Paz

Love of the republic in a democracy, is that of equality.

Baron de Montesquieu

Lowdly blows the north wind,
Through the shiv'ring trees,
Bare are all the branches,
Fallen all the leaves.
Gathered is the harvest
For another year,
Now our day of gladness,
Thanksgiving Day is here.

Alice C. D. Riley

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Mark Twain

MAMMON, n. The god of the world's leading religion.

Ambrose Bierce

Major speakers at the 2004 Republican National Convention used conflation words 17,800 percent more frequently than they mentioned Osama bin Laden. The statistical likelihood of this occurring by chance is less than 0.0000000008331 percent.

Al Franken

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Bertrand Russell

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength for the last stretch.
He read the "e," the "n," the "c," and at last the final "e," and staggered back into their arms.
"I think," he murmured at last from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax, "I feel good about it."

Douglas Adams

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

May the Winter Solstice lights illuminate your season.

Photo by Mary Anna Hickling

Men cling passionately to old traditions and display intense reluctance to modify customary modes of behavior, as innovators at all times have found to their cost. The dead-weight of conservatism, largely a lazy and cowardly distaste for the strenuous and painful activity of real thinking, has undoubtedly retarded human progress...

V. Gordon Childe

Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth century was in name Christian, and the fact that the entire industrial and commercial frame of society was the embodiment of the anti-Christian spirit must’ve had some weight, though I admit it was strangely little, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.

Edward Bellamy: his cousin, Francis Bellamy, was an American Baptist Minister, Christian Socialist, and the author of the Pledge of Allegiance

Most Christians have been told at one time or another that the Bible condemns all homosexual relationships. That view is simply incorrect.

Jack Rogers

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Robert Frost - The Black Cottage

Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites... They lie when they say they have reached their position through their own organizing ability. They generally have to pay men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay men to go down it.

G. K. Chesterton

My brain hurts.

Monty Python

My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.

Woody Allen

My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.

Indira Gandhi

My proposal is not a Robin Hood-like redistribution. The wage supplements and tax reductions I'm proposing for the middle class would enable them to spend more, and their spending would help move the economy to full capacity and sustained growth. Consequently, companies would enjoy higher profits, and the stock market would rise. Although the rich would pay higher taxes and thereby receive a somewhat smaller share of the economy's overall gains, those overall gains would be much larger than they would be otherwise. Hence, richer Americans are very likely to come out ahead compared to where they were before—as they did during the Great Prosperity, when they paid substantially higher taxes but enjoyed the fruits of faster growth.

Robert Reich

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

Steven Wright

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.

George Bernard Shaw

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Nearly three decades after Mr. Reagan's revolution, the single biggest piece of our economy, a third of it, is still government. From raking leaves in city parks to buying stealth bombers that cost 1.2 billion a copy, government takes the same share. But money for the basics that make society work is growing scarce. From those leaves in the park to textbooks to highway bridge maintenance to food safety inspections, money is dwindling because so much has been diverted to the already rich through giveaways, tax breaks, and a host of subsidies that range from the explicit to the deeply hidden.

David Cay Johnston

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!

Isaac Asimov

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

Barry Lopez

No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the ground that it was human nature.

A. A. Milne

No one should be judge in his own case.

Publilius Syrus

Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better.

Anonymous

Nor do I fear skepticism for any good soul. A just thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

Jim Horning

Nothing shows a lack of conscience better than bold-faced lying.

John W. Dean

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

Herman Melville

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

Dorothy Parker

Old Thrashbarg said that it was the ineffable will of Bob, and when they asked him what "ineffable" meant, he said look it up.

This was a problem because Old Thrashbarg had the only dictionary and he wouldn't let them borrow it. They asked him why not and he said that it was not for them to know the will of Almighty Bob, and when they asked him why not again, he said because he said so.

Douglas Adams

On one wall are three rows of state-of-the-art flat-screen TVs. Below the flat-screens is a long desk with several electronic switchboxes that control the cameras and audio in each of the booths...Big Brother is watching. It's a great way for the senior 'gator to keep tabs on what techniques the other 'gators are using.

Matthew Alexander, John Bruning

One is the loneliest number.

Harry Nilsson

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering.

Robert Heinlein

One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

Eric Hoffer

One night I came home unexpectedly and caught him preparing hors d'oeuvres with lungfish caviar. It led to a violent quarrel. I said I wanted a divorce, and we argued over the custody of the truffle.

Woody Allen

Probably one of the reasons why most people respond to infants is that they are so completely genuine, integrated or congruent. If an infant expresses affection or anger or contentment or fear there is no doubt in our minds that he is this experience, all the way through.

Carl Rogers

Learning builds daily accumulation, but the practice of Tao builds daily simplification. Simplify and simplify, until all contamination from relative, contradictory thinking is eliminated. Then one does nothing, yet nothing is left undone. One who wins the world does so by not meddling with it. One who meddles with the world loses it.

Lao-Tzu

Only very mature and well-balanced minds could afford such honesty.

Arthur C. Clarke

"Oh, I have what a lot of people would probably call communistic thoughts," said Eliot artlessly, "but, for heaven's sake, Father, nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time—or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes. I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies..."

Kurt Vonnegut

Other people ask us how we should deal with workmen holding shares in a business that might possibly go bankrupt. It never occurs to them to answer their own question, in a capitalist state in which business after business is going bankrupt.

G.K. Chesterton

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Audre Lorde

Our house, is a very, very, very fine house.
With two cats in the yard,
Life used to be so hard...

Graham Nash

...Our pig is completely out of the ordinary..."

"Well," said Mrs. Zuckerman, "it seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider."

E.B. White

Our system deliberately turns a crowd of men who might be impartial into irrational partisans. It teaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies. It gives every man an arbitrary brief that he has to work up as best he may and defend as best he can. It turns a room full of citizens into a room full of barristers. I know that it has many charms and virtues, fighting and good-fellowship; it has all the charms and virtues of a game. I only say that it would be a stark impossibility in a nation which believed in telling the truth.

G. K. Chesterton

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.

Richard Dawkins

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self-interest.

Samuel Johnson

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.

Theodore Roosevelt

People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

John Kenneth Galbraith

People can have the Model T in any colour--so long as it's black.

Henry Ford

Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it. This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are Christian end-timers. It's not just that they need to believe there is an escape hatch from the world they are creating. It's that the Rapture is a parable for what they are building down here—a system that invites destruction and disaster, then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine safety.

Naomi Klein

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

Benjamin Franklin

Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.

Abraham Lincoln

Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state.

Thomas Paine

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.... The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it.

Eric Hoffer

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a rich, multilayered study of love, war, and the supernatural. We hope these questions will deepen your appreciation and enjoyment of this towering work of classical zombie literature.

From the Reader's Discussion Guide.

Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.
(Who watches the watchmen?)

Juvenal

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Philip K. Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Albert Einstein

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Richard Dawkins

Religion is for those who don't want to go to Hell. Spirituality is for those of us who have already been through it.

Anonymous

Religion is identity. Indeed, in many parts of the world, including the United States, religion is fast becoming the supreme identity, encompassing and even superseding ethnicity, culture, and nationality.

Reza Aslan

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

Karl Marx

Remember the long-term effects of Watergate. While the immediate consequences of Nixon's outrageous behavior were jail sentences for several conservative Republicans and the election of a bumper crop of liberals to Congress in 1974, Watergate permanently poisoned public attitudes toward government and stirred up the wave that swept Ronald Reagan into office six years later—and made antigovernment cynicism the default American political sentiment.

Thomas Frank

Right, I'm a bigot, I know, but for the left.

Woody Allen

SELFISH, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

Ambrose Bierce

Santa Claus had the right idea. Visit everyone once a year.

Victor Borges

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

Kurt Vonnegut

Saying goodbye doesn't mean anything. It's the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Henri Poincaré

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

Carl Sagan

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

Thomas H. Huxley

Seek not, my soul, the life of the immortals; but enjoy to the full the resources that are within thy reach.

Pindar

Seven years later, Rice-Hughes successfully pressed Congress to mandate Web filters in public library computers, an important victory against civil libertarians and advocates of free speech.

Max Blumenthal

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson

Sharing is the central rule of social interaction among hunters and gatherers.

Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly

Sickness and healing are in every heart; death and deliverance in every hand.

Orson Scott Card

Since the early 1990's, Muslim organizations have conducted major voter registration drives, endorsing political candidates along the way. In the 2000 presidential election, many Muslim leaders and groups endorsed George W. Bush, and U.S. Muslims listened, voting overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate.

Stephen Prothero

Since the early 1990s, the fossil fuel lobby has mounted an extremely effective campaign of deception and disinformation designed to persuade policymakers, the press, and the public that the issue of climate change is stuck in scientific uncertainty.

Ross Gelbspan

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense

Carl Sagan

So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only one one-hundreth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion and lower crime is, by an economist's reckoning, terribly inefficient.

Steven D. Levitt Stephen J. Dubner

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

J. B. S. Haldane

So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.

Phillip K. Dick

Leopold: So, you're an inventor, hey?
Andrew: Crackpot inventor.

Woody Allen

Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. I think when you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.

George Carlin

Hoekstra had already concluded that the war was a mistake. And he felt the president wasn't really listening to the questions or opinions of his own party.

Some questions were about Osama bin Laden. Why did it seem the United States had let up on the search?

Bob Woodward

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

 Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes

Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.

Mitch Albom

We are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in the nature divided in body, but at the same time a unity by virtue of belonging to that order which suffers no division.

Plotinus

Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

Thomas Carlyle

Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.

Woody Allen, Getting Even

"It was when you insisted that the, uh, the young lady, Tish—that Tish must pay, too. 'Tone-stapple,' or something like it."

"Oh, 'tanstaafl.' Means 'There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.' And isn't," I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across the room, "or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free cost twice as much in long run or turns out worthless."

Robert A. Heinlein

Take this remark from Richard, poor and lame,
What'er's begun in Anger, ends in Shame.

Benjamin Franklin

In 2001, ten percent of the U.S. population held 71 percent of the wealth, and of that ten percent the top one percent controlled 38 percent of the total wealth...

Peter Phillips

That was absurd; let's eat dead bird.

Chris Radant, W.D. Richter

[When McCain ran against Bush in the 2000 primary,] Richard Hand, a professor at the racist, anti-Catholic Bob Jones University, wrote a now-infamous email in which he alleged that McCain "chose to sire children without marriage." When Hand was told on CNN that there was no evidence that his charge was true, he replied, "That's a universal negative. Can you prove that?"

Paul Begala

That's part of American greatness, is discrimination. Yes, sir. Inequality, I think, breeds freedom and gives a man opportunity.

Lester Maddox

The American government's policies do not reflect the views of average Americans but are dominated and controlled by corporate and elitist special interests.

John R. Talbott

The Bush team seized the moment of collective vertigo with chilling speed—not, as some have claimed, because the administration deviously plotted the crisis but because the key figures of the administration, veterans of earlier disaster capitalism experiments in Latin America and Eastern Europe, were part of a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain, and the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture.

Naomi Klein

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives bigotry no sanction...

George Washington

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Joads rolled away to the jungle camp,
There they cooked a stew.
And the hungry little kids of the jungle camp
Said: "We'd like to have some, too."
Said: "We'd like to have some, too."

Woody Guthrie, "Tom Joad"

The ... Reagan era ... ideas [have] been abandoned as the intellectual basis of a political program... There are no convinced supplysiders (though the catechism is still occasionally recited). There are no public intellectual leaders in any campaign for "free markets" and against regulation. "Free trade" has been reduced to a label, pasted over trade agreements that are anything but "free." The economic conservative still reigns supreme in the academy and on the talk shows, but in the public realm, he is today practically null and void. He does not exist.

James K. Galbraith

The attacks of 9/11 have been called a declaration of war. The truth is, they were an invitation to a war already in progress—a cosmic war that, in the Jihadist imagination, has been raging between the forces of good and evil since the beginning of time. It was an invitation that a great many Americans were more than willing to accept.

Reza Aslan

The attacks on the disadvantaged, carried out in the name of reconstruction and relief, did not stop there. In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps.

Naomi Klein

The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

Frank Herbert

The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.

George Bancroft

The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.

Anonymous

The best way to try to motivate somebody is by being direct with them. To be honest with them. Lies are never the right way to get your message across.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men,
Gang aft a-gley

Robert Burns

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Robert Frost

Moreover, they said, the clothes woven from this magic cloth could not be seen by anyone who was unfit for the office he held or who was very stupid.

Hans Christian Andersen

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school. Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Thomas Frank

The costs that undergirded filibusters as wars of attrition are no longer applicable; tight scheduling constraints have led the costs facing obstructionists to become negligible.

Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

Alan Alda

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

George Orwell

The experiences of millions of lives over centuries of time, relived by each of us in those aspects common to all men, prove to us that love is preferable to hate, peace to war, brotherhood to enmity, joy to sorrow, health to sickness, nourishment to hunger, life to death. And enough people recognize these values (in all countries, and inside all social systems) so that further academic disputation is only a stumbling block to action.

Howard Zinn

The explosive growth following the Clinton administration's increase in the top marginal tax rate in 1993 might well have been understood as a refutation of the supply-side claim that low marginal tax rates hold the key to rapid economic growth.

Norton Garfinkle

The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis... But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

J. B. S. Haldane

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

W. Somerset Maugham

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Mark Twain

The fact that so many people love their religions as much as, or more than, anything else in their lives is a weighty fact indeed. I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love.

Daniel Dennett

The facts of order from which the physico-theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to constitute a knockdown proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already.

William James

The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ.

Eric Hoffer

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.

John Sladek

The general populace must be excluded entirely from the economic arena, where what happens in a society is largely determined. Here the public is to have no role, according to prevailing democratic theory.

Noam Chomsky, Robert W. McChesney

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

 George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy—I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

Bertrand Russell

The good man is the teacher of the bad,
And the bad is the material from which the good may learn.
He who does not value the teacher,
Or greatly care for the material,
Is greatly deluded although he may be learned.
Such is the essential mystery.

Lao-Tzu

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

Meryl Streep

The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.

Rensis Likert

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

Elbert Hubbard

The handmade bread...wasn't a rarefied delicacy. Everyone knew what it was and took it for granted. It was not a stylish addition to affluent lifestyles; it was a simple comfort food brought here by modest immigrants.

Jeff Hertzberg

The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

Mark Twain

The idea of an election is much more interesting to me than the election itself...The act of voting is in itself the defining moment.

Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Henry Kissinger

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Albert Einstein

The internal evidence—the awful details of the abuse itself and the clear logical narrative they take on when set against what we know of the interrogation methods of the American military and intelligence agencies—is quite enough to show that what happened at Abu Ghraib, whatever is was, did not depend on the sadistic ingenuity of a few bad apples.

Mark Danner

The labyrinth has a single, winding path, meaning that you don't have to make decisions about which route to take. You just follow the path as it leads you into the centre and out again. Labyrinth-walking, a non-thinking, moving activity, frees your mind, taking you on a journey of calmness, meditation and, perhaps, enlightenment.

Jim Buchanan

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

Anatole France, The Red Lily

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

It said: Jane Crofut; the Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America...Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the mind of God...And the postman brought it just the same.

Thorton Wilder

The moral ideas of the individual are equally related to his general situation: it is no accident that parents and schoolmasters so often tell us that they can stand any vice rather than lying, the lie being the only defensive weapon of the child.

C.S. Lewis

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mother and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

Benjamin Spock

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

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

Abraham Lincoln

The mystai understood that the rites and the myth of Eleusis were symbolic: if you had asked them if there was sufficient historical evidence for Demeter's visit, they would have found the query somewhat inept.

Karen Armstrong

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

Frank Herbert

The nurturant parent model has two equal parents, whose job is to nurture their children and teach their children to nurture others.

George Lakoff, Howard Dean

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

John Stuart Mill

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

Socrates

The only thing worse than a man you can't control is a man you can.

Margo Kaufman

The opinions and teachings of Jesus...are in line with the best modern thought...Most of us are protesting at every step...that it is a ridiculous way, a disgraceful way, a socialistic way, an atheistic way, an immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to be made to turn back at once.

George Bernard Shaw

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

James Branch Cabell

The partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.

Plato

The past and the future is a joke to me now. I see that they're nothing. I see they ain't here.

John Patrick Shanley

The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.

Barbara Hall

The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Joseph Stalin

The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics.

Sam Harris

The primary purpose of the Data statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable Pi can be given that value with a Data statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.

Fortran manual for Xerox Computers

The problem was, first, an enormous political discrepancy between the despotic ancestors of our human lineage and the egalitarian foragers in whose bands our genes were evolved, and, second, the equally large discrepancy between those same egalitarians and the despotic human societies that followed them after the Neolithic.

Christopher Boehm

The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.

Frank Schaeffer

The process of creating new, democratic organs of government power is beginning, and, as never before, the greatest responsibility rests with the broadcast media.

Eduard Sagalaev

The proper motto is not 'Be good, sweet maid and let who can be clever,' but ' Be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can.'

C.S. Lewis

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

Abraham Lincoln

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Mark Twain

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Mark Twain, Notebook

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

R. D. Laing

The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.

Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Mark Twain

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Mark Twain

The same tax cuts have starved the public sector for revenues with which to underwrite public programs of economic opportunity and security. By contrast, the postwar era saw very substantial increases in social investments. These contributed to a more egalitarian society, both directly and indirectly. Social insurance protected ordinary people from economic setbacks beyond their personal control. Public sector jobs tended to command decent wages, benefits, and employment security. Public services allowed moderate-income citizens access to amenities (and necessities) that they might not be able to afford if they had to purchase them at market prices. This includes everything from free public parks to public health inoculations to subsidized mass transit, plus "positive externalities" such as clean drinking water.

Robert Kuttner

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and to hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.

George Burns

The service of the accepted image of economic life to the political needs of the business firm—the large corporation in particular—is, in fact, breathtaking. Broadly speaking, it removes from the corporation all power to do wrong and leaves with it only the power to do right.

Are its prices too high? The corporation is blameless. Prices are set by the market. Are profits unseemly? They too are determined by the market. Are products deficient in safety, durability, design, usefulness? They reflect the will of the sovereign consumer.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

Douglas Adams

The speed of him was like the ostrich, and his size was an elephant's; his hair was like pure gold and the brightness of his eyes, like gold that is liquid in the furnace. He was more terrible than the Flaming Mountain of Lagour, and in beauty he surpassed all that is in the world, even as the rose in bloom surpasses the dust of the desert.

Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days, and not him.

C.S. Lewis

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.

Thomas Jefferson

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

Rita Mae Brown

The story is frequently told of the great English capitalist, Mr. Peel, who took £50,000 and three hundred laborers with him to the Swan River colony in Australia. His plan was that his laborers would work for him, as in the old country. Arrived in Australia, however, where land was plentiful—too plentiful—the laborers preferred to work for themselves as small proprietors, rather than under the capitalist for wages. Australia was not England, and the capitalist was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water.

Eric Williams

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

George Eliot

The success of lies that politicians tell is determined by the willingness of the press to uncover them and punish their purveyors.

Paul Waldman

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Maria Montessori

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Maria Montessori

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Logan Pearsall Smith

The thirst for a quest, a goal, a meaning, is unquenchable, and if we don't provide benign or at least nonmalignant avenues, we will always face toxic religions.

Daniel C. Dennett

The trickle-down economic theory says that we should give those at the top more, and they will start and expand businesses and provide jobs and income for all. This is not a theory; it is propaganda put out by a Congress controlled by the wealthy to try to justify giving fully one third of the Bush tax cuts to the top 1 percent of earners in America.

John R. Talbott

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar Wilde

The truth is, marijuana probably isn't going to make you kill people. Most likely isn't going to fund terrorists, but pot makes you feel fine with being bored and it's when you're bored that you should be learning a new skill or some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you're not good at anything.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

The upper classes claimed privileged relations with the supernatural, and rulers frequently were ascribed divine or semidivine status. Just as class had replaced both real and metaphorical kinship as a basis for organizing societies, so religious concepts replace kinship as a medium for social and political discourse.

Bruce G. Trigger

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Albert Einstein

Their arrival gave me an opportunity of noting again the sense of hierarchy that seemed to exist among the apes.

Pierre Boulle

Then Moses said to God, 'If I go to the Israelites and tell them that the God of their forefathers has sent me to them, and they ask me his name, what shall I say?'

God answered, 'I AM; that is who I am. Tell them that I AM has sent you to them.'

Exodus 3:13-14

There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.

(If you know who I should attribute this to, drop me a line -Ken)

There can be no real healthcare reform without giving Americans the choice of a public health insurance program. What could be more American than letting Americans choose for themselves, instead of having employers, politicians, bureaucrats, and insurance companies do it for them, as they so often do under the present system?

Howard Dean

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Carl Jung

There comes a point where you have to stand up to reality and deny it.

Garrison Keillor

Everett's interpretation accepts the quantum equations entirely at face value and says that both cats are real. There is a live cat, and there is a dead cat; but they are located in different worlds. It is not that the radioactive atom inside the box either did or didn't decay, but that it did both. Faced with a decision, the whole world—the universe—split into two versions of itself, identical in all respects except that in one version the atom decayed and the cat died, while in the other the atom did not decay and the cat lived. It sounds like science fiction, but it goes far deeper than any science fiction, and it is based on impeccable mathematical equations, a consistent and logical consequence of taking quantum mechanics literally.

John Gribbin

There is a natural hierarchy and a silent negotiation going on, so that those with the stronger energy are able to set the rules and regulation for those with the weaker energy. The stronger dog only follows through—first with correction, last with a fight—if the other dog doesn't agree with or abide by the rules.

Cesar Millan, Melissa Jo Peltier

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody 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

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Jack London

There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.

Richard P. Feynman

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

Henry Miller

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

Henry Miller

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.

Learned Hand

There is no point.

Chris Radant, W.D. Richter

There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow.

Victor Hugo

There is too much education altogether, especially in American schools.

Albert Einstein

There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should.

I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't.

That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left.

Frank Darabont

These are some of the clues

1. Two of Sir Henry Baskerville's boots go missing when he is staying at a hotel in London. This means that someone wants to give them to the Hound of the Baskervilles to smell, like a bloodhound, so that it can chase him. This means that the Hound of the Baskervilles is not a supernatural being but a real dog.

Mark Haddon

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Andy Warhol

They conflated Iraq and 9/11. It wasn't that they were confused. They were the confusers. And many in the American public became, unwittingly, the confusees.

Al Franken

They flew out of the cloud.
They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.
For a while they flew on, motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.
"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.

On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life-forms.

Douglas Adams

[Some] bought into the theory that cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations automatically increased investment and economic growth. They forgot that taxes were much higher in the prosperous 1960s, and that tax-cuts can cause the ballooning deficits (hugely generated by Ronald Reagan) that inflict their own pain on the economy.

Ralph Nader

They gazed at God's Final Message to His Creation in wonderment, and were slowly and ineffably filled with a great sense of peace, and of final and complete understanding.

Douglas Adams

They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.

Kahil Gibran

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

Emily Dickinson

They want the federal government controlling the Social Security like it's some kind of federal program.

George W. Bush

They wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is.

Thomas More

They're just waiting for someone to step up. It should be us.

Mark Goffman

This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.

John F. Kennedy

This is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals: Mexico. Venezuela. Columbia. The court of Montezuma. Cortez and Columbus. The Food of the Gods, bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life.

Joanne Harris

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

Jack Kerouac

This town needs this measly one-horse institution if only to have someplace where people can come without crawling to Potter.

Frank Capra

Those who seek to abrogate the First Amendment separation of church and state, however, fail to comprehend both the teachings of Jesus and the lessons of history.

Randall Balmer

Of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of woman in the second generation.

Plato

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

"Thou art God," Patty said simply.
"Yes, Patty. And thou art God..."

Robert Heinlein

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Though it would be cynical and ahistorical to conclude that conversions to Christianity in late antiquity were made only for the sake of political advancement or social convenience, it would be naive to imagine that Christianity swept the empire only because of its evident spiritual superiority. Certainly, the Christians of the first three centuries, whose adherence to Christianity could easily prove their death warrant, were devout and extraordinary. But from the time of Constantine, the vast majority of Christian converts were fairly superficial people.

Thomas Cahill

Thus, however, I advise you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Time as he grows old teaches all things.

Aeschylus

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Groucho Marx

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past...
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

T.S. Eliot

To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Ambrose Bierce

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Oscar Wilde

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Bruce Lee

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Together, the growing concentration of executive power and the campaign for partisan predominance have produced an era of aggressive presidentialism, a theory of government and a pattern of government practice that treat our Constitution as vesting in the President a fixed and expansive category of executive authority largely immune to legislative control or judicial review.

Peter M. Shane

Too great a gap between rich and poor undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires.

Michael J. Sandel

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Mel Brooks

Trees like to have kids climb on them, but trees are much bigger than we are, and much more forgiving.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Truth is treason in the Empire of Lies.

Ron Paul

Turns out, it takes more than thirty minutes a night to fix everything that's destroying America, and that's where this book comes in. It's not just some collection of reasoned arguments supported by facts. That's the coward's way out.

This book is Truth. My Truth.

I deliver my Truth hot and hard. Fast and Furious. So either accept it without hesitation or get out of the way, because somebody might get hurt, and it's not going to be me.

Stephen Colbert

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

attributed to John Kenneth Galbraith

Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking place at the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; by the time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himself had not noticed his own discorporation and had gone right on composing his sequence.

Robert A. Heinlein

Unless you are very careful paranoia will get you in the end.

Mary Anna Hickling

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Isaac Asimov

Virtually is the new literally.

Jonathan Watts

Vitter returned to the Senate confident that the expired statute of limitations on his crimes prevented his prosecution. In a meeting of the Senate Republican Conference, he was welcomed with raucous applause from fellow Republicans.

Max Blumenthal

We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure--full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.

Henry Bromel

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

We are an intrinsic part of the universe. Much of the history of our galaxy is bound up in us. The carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that forms the bulk of our bodies was made in the deep interiors of former generations of stars that have died. The salts of the ancient seas circulate in our blood. We see this universe not from outside, but from inside: its stuff is our stuff. I once wrote, "A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms." In our knowing, the universe comes to know itself.

George Wald

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Tom Stoppard

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Marcel Proust

We have among us a class of mammon worshipers, whose one test of conservatism or radicalism is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what is called socialism.

Richard T. Ely

We have been at this juncture before. Our history swings much like a Pendulum between periods during which the benefits of economic change are concentrated in fewer hands, and periods during which the middle class shares broadly in the nation's prosperity and grows to include many of the poor—between periods during which we see ourselves as “in it together,” and periods during which we view ourselves as being pretty much on our own. Roughly speaking, the first stage of modern American capitalism (1870—1929) was one of increasing concentration of income and wealth: the second stage (1947—1975), of more broadly shared prosperity: the third stage (1980- 2o10), of increasing concentration. It is vital for our future that we commence a fourth stage, in which broad-based prosperity is again the norm.

Robert B. Reich

We have met the enemy and they are partly right.

Tony Campolo

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach.

Bertrand Russell

We hear endless talk in Washington about belt tightening and deficit reduction, but hardly a word about whether the $161 billion being spent in 2010 alone to fight wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq might be better spent helping embattled Americans here at home.

Arianna Huffington

We hold in our hands, the most precious gift of all: Freedom. The freedom to express our art. Our love. The freedom to be who we want to be. We are not going to give that freedom away and no one shall take it from us!

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well known liberal bias.

Stephen Colbert

We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.

H. G. Wells

We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas

We should pray to be "nothing." We were there to "soften our hearts to authority." Democracy, we were told, was "rebelliousness."

Jeff Sharlet

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

Alan Bennett

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

We therefore consider whether it is even yet conceivable to restore that long-forgotten thing called Self-Government: that is, the power of the citizen in some degree to direct his own life and construct his own environment...

G. K. Chesterton

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than change the preconceptions.

Jessamyn West

We will lower the tax burden on middle-class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore

We'll always have Paris.

Julius or Phillip Epstein or Howard Koch or Casey Robinson

We've given up far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now we've got to take them back.

John Le Carré

Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

Plato

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

George Carlin

Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

Woody Allen

What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to conceive.

Al Nelson—father, grandfather, great-grandfather.

What about Santa's cookies? I suppose parents eat them, too?

David Berenbaum

What binds us together across our differences in religion or politics or economic theory is that when each one of us is cut, our blood flows red. Mine does and yours does too. Those who would try to appropriate God or family or country for their own narrow ends, who believe that religious faith is the property of one particular ideology, forget the width of God's embrace, the healing power of a family's arms, and the generosity of this country's vision. God, family, and nation belong to all.

Edward M. Kennedy

What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense.

William James

What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society.

Sam Harris

What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty, working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas.

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life?

George Eliot

What if there's no God, and you only go around once, and that's it? Well, you know, don't you want to be part of the experience?

Woody Allen

What if this weren't a hypothetical question?

Unknown

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Susan Sontag

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual.

Dorothy L. Sayers

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

George Bernard Shaw

What to Do in Switzerland
You should open a Swiss bank account, because (a) you get a toaster and (b) you never have to pay income taxes again. The Internal Revenue Service has no jurisdiction in Switzerland. When you fill out your tax return, you just write, "Ha ha, I have a Swiss bank account and just TRY TO GET IT, YOU SUCKERS!" and all the IRS can do is gnash its teeth.

Dave Barry

[W]hat transpired in the battlefields of Flanders on Christmas Eve 1914 between tens of thousands of young men had nothing to do with original sin or productive labor. And the pleasure those men sought in each other's company bore little resemblance to the superficial rendering of pleasure offered up by nineteenth-century utilitarians and even less to Freud's pathological account of a human race preoccupied by the erotic impulse.

The men at Flanders expressed a far deeper human sensibility - one that emanates from the very marrow of human existence. ... They chose to be human. And the central human quality they expressed was empathy for one another...

Jeremy Rifkin

The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who believe "that solutions emerge from your... study of... reality." I nodded and... He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore..."

George Soros

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Robert Bolt

When I hear language like "You can't be saved unless you accept Christ as your personal savior," I know that it is usually sincere and heart-felt. But what it most likely means is, "We are on the inside, and you are on the outside. Ours is the only true faith. If you do it our way, you'll have better access to God than the followers of Moses or Buddha or Mohammed, or Charles Darwin, or the 'Inner Light', or whatever. We welcome everyone into God's family... as long as you're willing to become like us."

Gary A. Wilburn

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.

Lewis Carroll

When I was in therapy about two years ago, one day I noticed that I hadn't had any children. And I like children at a distance. I wondered if I'd like them up close. I wondered why I didn't have any. I wondered if it was a mistake, or if I'd done it on purpose, or what. And I noticed my therapist didn't have any children either. He had pictures of his cats on the wall. Framed.

Spalding Gray

...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

...when you have eliminated the improbable, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth.

Douglas Adams

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Mark Twain

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Mark Twain, Autobiography

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

George Bernard Shaw

When in doubt, tell the truth.

Mark Twain

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

Bertrand Russell

When solving a "panic" you must first ask yourself what you were doing that could possibly frighten an operating system.

Peter van der Linden

When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.

William Blake

When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.

Edward R. Murrow

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Although the Bush tax cuts for the nation's wealthiest families threaten American economic prosperity, they have done little for their ostensible beneficiaries. When the wealthy spend millions of dollars on more elaborate coming-of-age parties for their children, they only raise the bar that defines a special occasion. Even purely in terms of self-interest, they and their families would have fared much better if the money had been spent to repair aging bridges and inspect the cargo containers that enter the nation's ports.

Robert H. Frank

When we take a hard look at what's happening to America's middle class, its disappearance suddenly becomes not only imaginable but, unless drastic action is taken, inevitable.

Arianna Huffington

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.

Madeleine L'Engle

In fact, at a 1999 quantum conference in England, of ninety physicists polled about which interpretation of quantum mechanics they leaned toward, thirty chose many-worlds or another interpretation that includes no collapse.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley

Which is the greater crime, to rob a bank or to own one?

Bertolt Brecht

While holding himself out as a post-partisan, post-racial president, [President Obama] has exacerbated racial tensions, inflamed partisan divisiveness, engaged in acrimonious class warfare, and demonized anyone to the political right of the late Ted Kennedy.

David Limbaugh (conservative)

While it might not seem like I'm changing the tone when I accuse my friends on the right of being liars, my hope is that, if we keep calling them on their calculated dishonesty, their dishonesty will lose its effectiveness.

Al Franken

While the right wing cleverly has achieved its greatest gains in mainstream media sectors that ostensibly present opinion—columns, TV punditry, talk radio, and books—this opinion is predicated on a raft of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies presented to readers and viewers as fact.

David Brock

Why can't you be a genius? I'll tell you why, because you are too busy listening to the radio all the time.

Woody Allen

Why you bone-headed, square-toed, tank-town boobs, I been tryin' to tell ya. Can't you get it through your heads that this music fella's givin' you the double shuffle? He's puttin' the shake on ya. He's takin' out your eye-teeth while you're lookin' the other way. I'll tell ya what I'm sayin'—There's a burglar in the bedroom while you're fiddlin' in the parlour!

Meredith Willson

Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.

Walt Whitman

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.

Sophocles

With just enough of learning to misquote...

Lord Byron,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

With relief, with humiliation, with terror he understood that he, too, was all appearance, that someone else was dreaming him.

Jorge Luis Borges

With the bursting of the housing bubble, many middle-class homeowners who can no longer use their homes as piggy banks must face the reality of flat or declining wages. The downturn also has forced—or given a ready excuse for—firms to increase profits by shrinking their payrolls, laying off millions of workers and reducing the pay of millions more. It has simultaneously induced firms to ratchet up the pay of their “talent”—the executives and traders who drive the profits. At the same time, the Great Recession has starkly revealed the political power of big business and of Wall Street...

Unless these trends are reversed, the financially stressed middle class will not have the purchasing power to keep the economy growing. This will hurt even those who are well-off.

Robert Reich

Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.

Mark Vonnegut, writing about his father, Kurt.

Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there it will have been Hell even from the beginning.

C.S. Lewis

You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

Max Ehrmann

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

James Thurber

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

Norman Douglas

You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

Malcolm X

"You mean, you're dead and I'm alive."

"Absent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I won't quibble."

Neal Stephenson

You need a mommy really badly.

James V. Hart, Malia Scotch Marmo, Nick Castle

You see what power is—holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!

Amy Tan

You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the corn.

Deuteronomy 25:4

You would think political leaders would talk about the nation's surging inequality and the flattening of middle-class incomes. But as the divergence in income and wealth has grown to stunning proportions, it is rare to find even a Democratic politician who dwells on it.

Robert B. Reich

You've got your phenomenon on one hand. Concrete and knowable. On the other hand you've got the incomprehensible. You call it God, but to me, God or no, it remains just that, the unknowable.

Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

J. K. Rowling

[AT&T CEO Ed] Whitacre understood that he, allied with the cable industry and the other parts of Bell, was strategically positioned to choke the Internet industry into submission.

Tim Wu

[T]he solution was liberalism: it had rescued the nation from the mindless boom-and-bust cycle of laissez-faire; it had defeated fascism; and it was then, in 1965, delivering one of the greatest periods of prosperity in history. In that year, American GNP grew by 6.5 percent—in these glory days of the billionaire it barely gets over 2 percent—in line with the official, stated goal of American economic policy: "a growing abundance, widely shared." Taxes were high, and the richest man in the world was the oil baron J. Paul Getty, worth between two and four billion dollars and fond of grousing about how tough it was to be rich in an era when even the middle-class man had access to what had once been the exclusive privileges of great wealth.

Thomas Frank

[T]here can be no doubt that [the perpetrators of 9/11] believed they were acting in the service of God...They were fighting a cosmic war, not against the American imperium, but against the eternal forces of evil.

Reza Aslan

[The president] could take the politics out of Iraq once and for all if he would simply go on television and say to the American people, "Yes, we made mistakes." Imagine if he did that, how it would transform the politics of our country.

Barack Obama

Corporations...should be regulated if they are...working to the public injury. It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.

Teddy Roosevelt

...football consists primarily of two regrettable elements of life—violence, punctuated by committee meetings...

George F. Will

He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.

Terry Pratchett

In the final analysis, [the Pentagon report] found, "having a same-gender or an opposite-gender orientation is unrelated to job performance in the same way as is being left- or right-handed."

Dr. Nathaniel Frank

i've seen your flag on the marble arch
but love is not a victory march
it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

Leonard Cohen

According to Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the Religious Right, the political agenda began to take shape during a conference call among evangelical political leaders in the late 1970s. After discussing their success in forming a coalition in the Bob Jones case, someone asked for suggestions about other matters. Someone else said, "How about abortion?"

Jon Butler, Grant Wacker & Randall Balmer

the President of the United States has the unrestrained Power of granting Pardon for Treason; which may be sometimes exercised to screen from Punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the Crime, and thereby prevent a Discovery of his own guilt.

George Mason (a distinguished Virginian who refused to sign the Constitution [via Sandford Levinson])

...the lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than to crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Hermann Goering

...we must repair the underlying Constitutional framework of our republic and provide checks to executive authority.

A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq

And I, who said forty years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing.

George Bernard Shaw

The classic medical text on [psychopathic personalities] is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, and published in 1941. Read it!...And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow...?

Kurt Vonnegut