When we are dealing with death we are constantly being dragged down by the event: Humor diverts our attention and lifts our sagging spirits.

God is a comic, playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn't know what fear was, we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.

Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, P

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

William Mcilvanney

Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.

Gary Ross

I get very nervous around famous people and I get nervous around beautiful women.

Liev Schreiber

Black hair and blue eyes are my favorite combination.

Cassandra Clare

Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn't get serious with people. They don't expect it from you, and they don't want to see it. You're not entitled to be serious, you're a clown.

Fanny Brice

I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

Oscar Wilde

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

Benjamin Franklin

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Voltaire

The gods of the realms are many and varied -- or they are the many and varied names and identities tagged onto the same being. I know not -- and care not -- which.

R.A. Salvatore