Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

My life needs editing.

Mort Sahl

Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

Frederick Douglass

Idolatry is in a man's own thought, not in the opinion of another.

John Selden

Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life with living populations and all their pressures and counter pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no high-minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Ho

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

E. O. Wilson

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Joseph Addison

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

William Ellery Channing

When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.

Hugh White

Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

Valentino Rossi

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

Philip Pullman

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Abraham Lincoln

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Samuel Butler