Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

Don't tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won't respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, 'Melissa you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep.'.

Joan Rivers

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Harry S Truman

The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.

Francis Wright

Doing science, particularly the synthesis of disparate ideas, is not as arcane as it is often made out to be. Discipline and taste play a vital role, but the activity is familiar to anyone who has made some effort to be creative.

John Henry Holland

A spark of kindness starts a fire of love.

Source Unknown

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

Leo Tolstoy

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Jacob Bronowski

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Kin Hubbard

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?

Amy Reed

The mere fact that you have obstacles to overcome is in your favor...

Robert Collier

I got a telegraph from my mother who said that my step-father had had a heart attack, come home and earn a living. So I went back to England and the only thing I knew to earn any cash was through hairdressing.

Vidal Sassoon

Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Steve Jobs