After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?

You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.

Nicholas Sparks

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.

Henry Ward Beecher

What monster have we here? A great Deed at this hour of day? A great just deed -- and not for pay? Absurd -- or insincere?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.

George Orwell

I wasn't afraid to fail. Something good always comes out of failure.

Anne Baxter

Oh, I'm terrible at travel.

Johnny Vegas

Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective --the unconscious objective of a disunited people --has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type.

Constance Rourke

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

David Herbert Lawrence

A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

Maurice Blanchot

Socialists think profits are a vice; I consider losses the real vice.

Sir Winston Churchill

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

William Faulkner

They want to be free and they do not know how to be just.

Abbe Sieyes