Human beings are the only ones in nature who are aware that they will die. For that reason and only for that reason, I have a profound respect for the human race, and I believe that its future is going to be much better than its present. Even knowing that their days are numbered and that everything will end when they least expect it, people make of their lives a battle that is worthy of a being with eternal life. What people regard as vanity-leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten- I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Oscar Wilde

One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.

Lee Smolin

Suddenly a single shot on the extreme left rang out on the clear morning air, followed quickly by several others, and the whole line pushed rapidly forward through the brush.

John Gibbon

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.

Edmund Burke

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A creative element is surely present in all great systems, and it does not seem possible that all sympathy or fundamental attitudes of will can be entirely eliminated from any human philosophy.

Morris Raphael Cohen

Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw The blind to hide the garden, where the moonEnjoys the open blossoms as they strawTheir beauty for his taking, boon for boon.And I do lift my aching arms to you,And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,And I do weep for very pain of you,And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence,

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.

Rachel Weisz

It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantryhe staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial calvary. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Too many people just eat to consume calories. Try dining for a change.

John Walters

They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

Socrates

But what is ? What is ?The words and do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about . I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of .To a heard of rams, that ram the herdsman dries each evening into a special enclosure to feed, and that becomes twice as fat as the others, must seem to be a genius.

Leo Tolstoy