I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

Jean Piaget

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Benjamin Franklin

The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?

Hermann Hesse

Great people are meteors designed to burn so that the earth may be lighted.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

Fritjof Capra

Strength of mind rests in sobriety for this keeps your reason unclouded by passion.

Pythagoras

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at least he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Ea

I was really fascinated by politics. It always has been part of my view that politics really is a calling or you wouldn't go into it, because it's demanding and potentially has a toll on you and your family.

John Key

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.

Calvin Trillin

If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: How do you want the world to be in fifty years? and What do you want your life to be like five years from now? the answers are quite often preceded by Provided there is still a world and Provided I am still alive. To the often-heard question, Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.

Hannah Arendt

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

Samuel Johnson

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them

Charles Dickens