There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

Walter Bagehot

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

Aldous Huxley

The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.

Heisenberg

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

George Bernard Shaw

What's the best part of a movie? I love to know what my name is. It's just so fun. That's the first thing I ask. It's just fun because you have a different name in every movie.

Elle Fanning

The eagle has no fear of adversity. We need to be like the eagle and have a fearless spirit of a conqueror!

Joyce Meyer

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Harriet Martineau

she didn't need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilter army-surplus jacket and combat bots, she did this without apology. It was a great irony that the very fact of a relationship with her would diminish her appeal, that the moment she came to love me back and depend on me as much as I depended on her, she would no longer be a truly independent spirit. No way in hell was I going to be the one to take that quality away from her.

Jodi Picoult

I definitely think cheerleaders have no fear.

Ashley Tisdale

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Aldous Huxley

The universe evolved from something and nothing, and has most of these elemental dualpair until now.

Joey Lawsin