An atheist is a man who looks through a telescope and tries to explain all that he can't see.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Alan Alda

The span of three or four minutes is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. People lose hundreds of minutes everyday, squandering them on trivial things. But sometimes in those fragments of time, something can happen you'll remember the rest of your life.

Lisa Kleypas

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This

George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 17

Some evils are cured by contempt.

Proverb

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians.

George Santayana, The Life of Re

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

Patrick J. Kennedy

We have bigger houses but smaller families: We have more degrees but less sense;more knowledge but less judgements;more experts but more problems;more medicines, but less healthiness.We've been all the way to the moon and back,but we have trouble crossing the streetto meet the new neighbour.We build more computersto hold more information,to produce more copies than ever,but we have less communication.We have become long on quantitybut short on quality.These are times of fast foods,but slow digestion;tall man, but short character;steep profits, but shallow relationships.It is time when there is much in the windowbut nothing in the room.

Dalai Lama

Finance is not merely about making money. It's about achieving our deep goals and protecting the fruits of our labor. It's about stewardship and, therefore, about achieving the good society.

Robert J. Shiller

I would love to work with Adam Sandler. Because then all I'd have to do is just turn the camera on and off.

David Zucker

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

James Madison

We can't get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can't just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.

Barack Obama

Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is. Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world. Love what you do or don't do it.

Mark Cuban