Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn't have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds.

The hardest thing about being famous is that people are always nice to you. You're in a conversation and everybody's agreeing with what you're saying - even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don't want to hear.

Al Pacino

I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

Jerry Pournelle

You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

George Bernard Shaw

I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity... in important things, diversity... in all things, generosity.

George Bush

I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.

Paul Gauguin

The golden child may be the oldest one, unless it's the youngest. It may be the toughest one, unless it's the most sensitive. It's not even necessary that Mom and Dad have the same favorite - and typically they don't.

Jeffrey Kluger

A book is kind of like a good Horcrux, if we can imagine that -- a piece of the writer's soul, preserved in a physical object for all time, and changing the lives of all those who come in contact with it.

Cheryl B. Klein

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

John Ruskin

For all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

George Orwell

I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred --that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The President is not squaring with the American people as to the seriousness of our nation's fiscal condition. It is time for people to stand up and tell the truth.

Kent Conrad