For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

S. I. Hayakawa

I get curious about new things. My real strength is going into a field that has not been investigated before, and finding new approaches to it.

Joshua Lederberg

Happiness is a quality of the soul...not a function of one's material circumstances.

Aristotle

Sitting down to a meal with an Indian family is different from sitting down to a meal with a British family.

Roland Joffe

It is the theory that decides what we can observe.

Albert Einstein

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

H. P. Lovecraft

I do believe that movies are subject to a million interpretations.

Oliver Stone

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

David Mitchell

Hamming's Motto: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Hamming

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

John Updike

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

Cyril Connolly

The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

Jimmy Breslin