I don't approve of surprises. The pleasure is never enhanced and the inconvenience is considerable.

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

Carl Bernstein

You know, I was gonna get sick or I was gonna get injured or something. The only choice I had, the only thing I could control, was when and how and where that was going to happen.So, I made a rope. And I went up to the summit to hang myself.But, I had to test it, you know. Course. You know me. And the weight of the log snapped the limb of the tree, and I couldn't even kill myself the way I wanted to. I had power. over. nothing.And that's when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew, somehow, that I had to stay alive. Somehow. I had to keep breathing, even though I had no reason to hope, and all my logic said that I would never see this place again.So, that's what I did. I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And then, one day that logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in, gave me a sail.And now here I am. I'm back. In Memphis, talking to you. I have ice in my glass.And I've lost her all over again. I'm so sad that I don't have Kelly. But I'm so grateful that she was with me on that island.And I know what I have to do now. And, I keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?

William Broyles Jr., Cast Away (

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Henry David Thoreau

It's a different era. Our job now is to show leadership and vision and to help the next generation of artists.

Karen Kain

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's

Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

Ghose Aurobindo

Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.

Thomas Szasz

Someday, Will, I will go where none can follow me, and I think it will be sooner rather than later. Have you ever asked yourself why I agreed to be your parabatai?

Cassandra Clare

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

Hippocrates

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

Gore Vidal

Anyone who acquires more than the usual amount of knowledge concerning a subject is bound to leave it as his contribution to the knowledge of the world.

Liberty Hyde Bailey