If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean even if it did build muscle whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.

The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

Terry Pratchett

In regard to this principle, that all men are born free and equal, if there is an animal on earth to which it does not applythat is not born free, it is manhe is born in a state of the most abject want, and in a state of perfect helplessness and ignorance, which is the foundation of the connubial tie. Who should say that all the soil in the world is equally rich, the first rate land in Kentucky and the Highlands of Scotland because the superficial content of the acre is the same, would be just as right as he who should maintain the absolute equality of man in virtue of his birth. The ricketty and scrofulous little wretch who first sees the light in a work-house, or in a brothel, and who feels the effects of alcohol before the effects of vital air, is not equal in any respect to the ruddy offspring of the honest yeoman; nay, I will go further, and say that a prince, provided he is no better born than royal blood will make him, is not equal to the healthy son of a peasant.

John Randolph

Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies, and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family, like all parents do, but it was a hobby - nothing more.

Bonnie Raitt

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Benjamin Franklin

Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth

William Shakespeare

There are many truely horrible things goin' on in the world whilst we're lost to the druthers over spilled milk.

James Dye

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I think the thing that the American people want is for the divisive debate on health care to stop.

Jacob Lew

In our music, in our everyday life, there are so many negative things. Why not have something positive and stamp it with blackness?

Jamie Foxx

The best way to hold a man is in your arms.

Mae West

It is a fantastic letter. Very understated. He calls it an optical maser, it's as if a maser was made to run in the optical. No flamboyant phrase, just straightforward science.

Peter Franken

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Albert Camus