'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.'

It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom, said the Voice...The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our sue, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern My name also is Ransom, said the Voice.

C.S. Lewis

Inaction may be the biggest form of action.

Jerry Brown

There are so many different reasons as to why I love riding trains. But I think ultimately it's the romantic feeling of it. There's something about it that just transports me into old films.

Rosario Dawson

It is generally much more shameful to lose a good reputation than never to have acquired it.

Pliny the Elder

The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.

Barbara Ehrenreich

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Marc Chagall

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

Golda Meir

We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt.

Bertrand Russell

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

Walt Disney

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

C.S. Lewis

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

Steven Wright