I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

Richard Dawkins

I would not change my blest estate for all the world calls good or great.

Isaac Watts

But presidential approval also became a surrogate measure of national unity and patriotism.

Thomas E. Mann

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations reality is therefore abandoned.

Emile Durkheim

But much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney. Mr. Wallaces warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.

Clare Boothe Luce

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.

George Bernard Shaw

The respect that you have for yourself sets a standard for others.

Evette Carter

Say the report is exaggerated.

Mark Twain

Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

Paul Karl Feyerabend

You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Every challenge you encounter in life is a fork in the road. You have the choice to choose which way to go - backward, forward, breakdown or breakthrough.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

Christopher Hitchens