Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Edmund Burke

You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.

John Green

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I feel that education needs an overhaul - courses are obsolete and grades are on the way out.

Kent McCord

We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

Noam Chomsky

When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.

Charles Bukowski

So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

Richard Dawkins

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill-will.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.

Geoffrey Cottrell

What he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit

William Shakespeare

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Edith Wharton

I think every woman's entitled to a middle husband she can forget.

Adela Rogers St. Johns