Appreciation is a wonderful thing It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

My father said When in doubt, castle.

Kurt Vonnegut

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

Aldo Leopold

A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.

Tom Hanks

Jim Crow was king . . . and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive. The baseball held was my fantasy of what life offered.

Lou Brock, "International Herald

He who knows the truth and does not speak it is a miserable coward.

Julius Streicher

I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, it a nonpractice. I personally feel that it's just as worthy on a weekend to rake the lawns of an elderly neighbor or to climb a mountain and marvel at the beauty of this land we live in as it is to sing hosannas or go to Mass. In other words, I think every many finds his own church- and not all of them have four walls - Judge Haig (Page 399)

Jodi Picoult

Religions are all alike -- founded upon fables and mythologies

Thomas Jefferson

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate.

Ann Druyan

And since you know you cannot see yourself, so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself, that of yourself which you yet know not of.

William Shakespeare

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, No