Oh, for boyhood's painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor's rules, knowledge never learned of schools.

I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time...but I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night...'strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?

Neil Gaiman

If you don't stand for something, how can anyone respect what you do?

Miranda Lambert

As long as enough people can be frightened, then all people can be ruled. That is how it works in a democratic system and mass fear becomes the ticket to destroy rights across the board.

James Bovard

Productive achievement is a consequence and an expression of health and self-esteem, not its cause.

Nathaniel Branden

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.

William Shakespeare

Imagine that I am riding a bicycle toward you. As I approach an intersection I nearly collide, so it seems to me, with a horsedrawn cart. I swerve and barely avoid being run over. Now think of the event again, and imagine that the cart and the bicycle are both traveling close to the speed of light. If you are standing down the road, the cart is traveling at right angles to your light of sight. You see me, by reflected sunlight, traveling toward you. Would not my speed be added to the speed of light so that my image would get to you considerably before the image of the cart? Should you not see me swerve before you see the cart arrive? Can the cart and I approach the intersection simultaneously from my point of view, but not from yours? Could I experience a near collision with the cart while you perhaps see me swerve around nothing and pedal cheerfully on toward the town of Vinci? These are curious and subtle questions. They challenge the obvious. There is a reason that no one thought of them before Einstein. From such elementary questions, Einstein produced a fundamental rethinking of the world, a revolution in physics.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos. (New York: B

In dealing with those who share his bed, the enlightened ruler may enjoy their beauty but should not listen to their special pleas...

Han Fei

I'm getting married because I'm in love with a girl and want to spend my life with her. You can't live your life doing what other people want you to or you'll be miserable. At some point you just have to be yourself.

Dan Marino

The best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is the imagination.

Homer W. Smith

To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.

David McCullough

When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity. We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

Lewis Thomas