My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

Thomas Robert Malthus

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

Oscar Wilde

Is anyone serious about the politics of happiness? David Cameron dipped a toe in the water, using the word lightly, but denying the hard policies it implies. Labour shies away from it, but should take up the challenge.

Polly Toynbee

Of all the riches that we hug, of all the pleasures we enjoy, we can carry no more out of this world than out of a dream.

John S. Bonnell

We should keep so close to facts that we never have to remember the second time what we said the first time.

F. Marion Smith

The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.

Stendhal

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.

Jawaharlal Nehru

The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

Marcel Duchamp

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

William Osler

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

Bertrand Russell

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, speech befor

The ideas that come out of most brainstorming sessions are usually superficial, trivial, and not very original. They are rarely useful. The process, however, seems to make uncreative people feel that they are making innovative contributions and that others are listening to them.

A Harvey Block