I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.

A source of bad conscience, however, is the knowledge that my way of life, austere though it may appear to the richer folk, is still ruinously exploitive of nature -- not in my backyard, where I practice harmlessness toward even the wasps, but in the atmosphere, where my fossil fuel combustion's carbon dioxide is helping change the climate; in all those mountainous places where the metals and minerals that structure and drive my American life are torn from the earth; and in the flesh of fish and birds, mammals, and reptiles, where the chemicals that made the paper and plastic I use bioaccumulate, deforming reproduction. That guilty knowledge is another argument for material simplicity. The less I consume, the less harm I do to that which I love. In a consumer society, harmless living may be simple, but it is not easy. I make no claim to exemplary harmlessness or simplicity.

Stephanie Mills, Epicurean Simpl

The rejection that we all take and the sadness and the aggravation and the loss of jobs and all of the things that we live through in our lives, without a sense of humor, I don't know how people make it.

Marlo Thomas

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have good looking kids. Thank goodness my wife cheats on me.

Rodney Dangerfield

It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.

David Fyfe

Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, the laws of death.

John Ruskin

Give help rather than advice.

Marquis De Vauvenargues

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice,

John Stuart Mill, "First publish

It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.

Michel de Montaigne

Hate can only flourish where love is absent.

William C. Menninger

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

George Santayana

If a theory purports to explain everything, then it is likely not explaining much at all.

Massimo Pigliucci