There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked - but it's immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.

Laura Linney

Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.

Neil Gaiman

The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.

Edward de Bono

He who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations.

Confucius

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

Galileo Galilei

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Christopher Hitchens

Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals by fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence. Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged but in the creature judging, and when we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

Orson Scott Card

I didn't run for student council president. I don't see myself in any way in elected office. I love policy. I'm not particularly fond of politics.

Condoleezza Rice

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Phi

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.

Plato

Growing up, I had a front row seat to seeing two people work really hard. My dad scrubbed toilets at a private Catholic school for a while, and that was to help me get through school.

Mia Love

The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.

Nicholson Baker